AN AMERICAN IDYLL 



THE LIFE OF 
CARLETON H. PARKER 





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AN AMERICAN IDYLL 

THE LIFE OF 
CARLETON H. PARKER 



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AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


THE LIFE OF 
CARLETON H. PARKER 

By 

Cornelia Stratton Parker 



BOSTON 

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 






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COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

First Impression, May, 1919 
Second Impression, August, 1919 
Third Imoression, September, 1919 
Fourth Impression, October, 1919 
Fifth Impression, January, 1920 
Sixth Impression, August, 1920 
Seventh Impression, March, 1921 


The poem on the opposite page is here 
reprinted with the express permission of 
Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers 
of Robert Louis Stevenson's Works. 


APR 





Yet, O stricken heart, remember, O remember, 

How of human days he lived the better part. 

April came to bloom, and never dim December 
Breathed its killing chill upon the head or heart. 

Doomed to know not Winter, 0«/y Spring, # being 
Yrod the flowery April blithely for a while, 

TW /f// of music, joy of thought and seeing, 

Czzz/z^ tf/zz/ stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile. 

Came and stayed and went, and now when all is finished. 
You alone have crossed the melancholy stream. 

Yours the pang, but his, O his, the undiminished. 
Undecaying gladness, undeparted dream. 

All that life contains of torture, toil, and treason. 

Shame, dishonor, death, to him were but a name. 

Here, a boy, he dwelt through all the singing season 
And ere the day of sorrow departed as he came. 















/ 



i 



Written for our three children . 

Dedicated to all those kindred souls, friends of 
Carl 'Darker whether they knew him or not, who 
are making the fight, without bitterness but with 
all the understanding, patience, and enthusiasm 
they possess, for a saner, kindlier, and more joyous 
world. 

And to those especially who love greatly along 
the way . 






















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INTRODUCTION TO THE 
SEVENTH EDITION 


Was it all a thousand years ago? 

Time has nothing to do with it. Yet I know by count 
that it was two years and ten months past — the cleav¬ 
age between two worlds. 

Somehow, born of the struggle of those first months, 
grew the conviction that I must put down in black and 
white the record of fifteen years. Who would ever read 
that record was a hazy inconsequential thought, at best. 
We act first and reason afterwards. I thought of reasons 
for writing this book after it was written. Yet the truth 
of the matter was that I wrote it because something with¬ 
in me urged me on. Nor would I perhaps ever have had 
the courage to do anything with the material after it was 
written, had it not been for the enthusiasm of the three 
friends who read the manuscript. I must send it to the 
“Atlantic Monthly.” One of the three suggested that 
a few of Carl Parker’s friends might be interested in get¬ 
ting the entire manuscript published in modest form — 
say one hundred and fifty copies. The other two were 
bolder. They ventured the guess that some publisher 
might see fit to bring it out in book form, just as other 
books are published. 

That was somewhat of an appalling thought. It rather 
hurt my pride. I jumped ahead in imagination to the 
actual publication of the manuscript. I visioned a possi¬ 
ble edition of five hundred copies. And then I saw no¬ 
body buying them. It troubled my soul. The life of Carl 



X 


INTRODUCTION 


Parker, dusty and forgotten on commercial bookshelves. 
Words that had taken something of my very life to write, 
that told of warm, innermost things, growing mouldy on 
dark back shelves in corner bookstores. 

The manuscript was finally typed. There are those 
who feel that the sort of person who could write such a 
book as this must be callous, devoid of finer feelings. I 
can only say that three different times I almost gave 
up the whole thing, because it seemed so impossible to 
be able to read the manuscript to the typist. It was a 
nightly ordeal, which meant very real suffering to meet 
and go through with. Some parts of it I typed myself. 

Then why give such a document to the world, if it 
seemed too close and near to share with one stenographer? 
Why, indeed. ... At any rate, I never once concretely 
visioned people reading it. 

It was mailed. Did the editor of the “Atlantic 
Monthly” think there was any part of it he could use 
in his magazine? Would it otherwise be at all suitable 
for a book? Please, no one in the world can guess how 
foolishly presumptuous I felt asking those questions. 
And again, how fearfully sensitive. There would be an 
acute pain to know that what I had put down on paper 
as the most wondrous thing in the world to me, would be 
sent back direct, with a little printed slip stating that it 
was deemed inadvisable to publish it. 

Instead, on Christmas evening, came a special deliv¬ 
ery letter, saying that two articles would appear in the 
“Atlantic Monthly,” and later the whole thing would be 
brought out in book form. For several days I lived in the 
clouds. It had seemed impossible that life could ever 
hold such a thrill and excitement again! 

And then, one day, came a letter from the editor-pub- 


INTRODUCTION 


xi 


lisher, saying that he had decided to publish four thousand 
copies in the first edition of the book. At that I came 
down to earth with a thud. Four thousand people reading 
the very inner experiences of our two lives! Why, it was 
like these nightmares people have of appearing unclad in 
public. It was terrible. I had longed to pass on and per¬ 
petuate for a few the personality of a great man I knew 
and loved. But four thousand people — of that number 
so many would not understand, so many would lose the 
beauty and helpfulness I wanted to consecrate in the 
feeling that such things never should have been shared 
with others. 

Then the quick thought — but four thousand people 
never will read the book. There again it meant the tur¬ 
moil of dismay over thinking of the copies which would 
not be bought. Those dusty copies on dark back book¬ 
shelves in corner bookstores. 

Was all that a thousand years ago? The anguish of 
those early weeks after the first publication! To have 
folks speak to me of having read the book, to get letters 
about it. Then slowly it began to dawn on me that people 
were taking what I had written in the spirit in which I 
wrote it. That as living with such a man as Carl Parker 
had meant so much to me that I had felt something of it 
must be shared, so those who read the telling of it rejoiced 
that I had opened my heart, and were grateful. 

Not all, oh, goodness, no; not all! I am sorry that I 
have hurt the sensibilities of some — sorry for their sakes 
and mine, that to them the worth of a man like Carl 
Parker could not be told without the manner of its telling 
detracting too much from the richness of what I tried to 
impart. I would consciously distress no one. 


INTRODUCTION 


• • 

Xll 

And yet, no matter how many souls I have pained, I am 
glad, glad, glad I wrote this book! For I know that 
enough have caught the personality of the man, enough 
have felt his enthusiasm, his courage, his joy, to make 
their own lives more worth the fight. Just as in the flesh 
this man touched people’s lives, and they ever after had a 
new zest in living, so through this book, these printed 
words, somehow has been able to flow a little of that radi¬ 
ance, that constructive insight, which has left mankind 
the richer. I glory in every letter telling of how Carl Par¬ 
ker’s spirit has taken hold of hearts, through my poor 
written words, and made them lighter, and at the same 
time more filled with a determination of accomplishment. 
Boys and girls not yet in college have written and spoken 
to me; university students — that age he longed to set 
toward the light; young men and women starting out in 
life, lovers, young married couples, parents, old people 
whose handwriting is no longer steady. They have caught 
something of Carl Parker’s ardor. They are cheered, and 

' V 

their faith made strong, because I did tell of our life to¬ 
gether — that very telling which dismayed these others. 

Knowledge steadily progresses on beyond that point 
where death forced Carl Parker to cease his work. More 
is known now concerning psychology, psychopathology, 
concerning the technique of applying that knowledge to 
the industrial problems, than he knew. That is as it 
should be. Some day his ideas on labor-psychology will 
be considered out of date. They still, to-day, point the 
way to new and further developments. 

Should his intellectual contributions be totally super¬ 
seded, the spirit of him will be fresh, poignant, so long as 
people live who knew him. If this book could but per¬ 
petuate something of that spirit even beyond that time; 


INTRODUCTION 


Xlll 


or into the years to come, when all of us are gone who 
knew and loved this man as he lived his joyous unfet¬ 
tered life among us. . . . Sometimes, from the way it 
has been received, I grow bold to feel perhaps, perhaps, 
this small book will be able to do a little of just that. 


New York City, January, 1921 


C. S. P. 




PREFACE 


It was a year ago to-day that Carl Parker died — March 
17, 1918. His fortieth birthday would have come on 
March 31. His friends, his students, were free to pay 
their tribute to him, both in the press and in letters 
which I treasure. I alone of all, — I who knew him best 
and loved him most, — had no way to give some outlet 
to my soul; could see no chance to pay my tribute. 

One and another have written of what was and will 
be his valuable service to economic thought and progress; 
of the effects of his mediation of labor disputes, in the 
Northwest and throughout the nation; and of his inesti¬ 
mable qualities as friend, comrade, and teacher. 

“He gave as a Federal mediator,” — so runs one esti¬ 
mate of him, — “all his unparalleled knowledge and 
understanding of labor and its point of view. That 
knowledge, that understanding he gained, not by aca¬ 
demic investigation, but by working in mines and woods, 
in shops and on farms. He had the trust and confidence 
of both sides in disputes between labor and capital; his 
services were called in whenever trouble was brewing. 
. . . Thanks to him, strikes were averted; war-work of 
the most vital importance, threatened by misunderstand¬ 
ings and smouldering discontent, went on.” 

But almost every one who has written for publication 
has told of but one side of him, and there were such count¬ 
less sides. Would it then be so out of place if I, his wife, 
could write of all of him, even to the manner of husband 
he was? 


XVI 


PREFACE 


I have hesitated for some months to do this. He had 
not yet made so truly national a name, perhaps, as to 
warrant any assumption that such a work would be ac¬ 
ceptable. Many of his close friends have asked me to do 
just this, however; for they realize, as I do so strongly, 
that his life was so big, so full, so potential, that, even as 
the story of a man, it would be worth the reading. 

And, at the risk of sharing intimacies that should be 
kept in one’s heart only, I long to have the world know 
something of the life we led together. 

An old friend wrote: “Dear, splendid Carl, the very 
embodiment of life, energized and joyful to a degree I 
have never known. And the thought of the separation of 
you two makes me turn cold. . . . The world can never 
be the same to me with Carl out of it. I loved his high 
spirit, his helpfulness, his humor, his adoration of you. 
Knowing you and Carl, and seeing your life together, has 
been one of the most perfect things in my life.” 

An Eastern professor, who had visited at our home 
from time to time wrote: “You have lost one of the 
finest husbands I have ever known. Ever since I have 
known the Parker family, I have considered their home 
life as ideal. I had hoped that the too few hours I spent 
in your home might be multiplied many times in coming 
years. ... I have never known a man more in love with 
a woman than Carl was with you.” 

So I write of him for these reasons: because I must, 
to ease my own pent-up feelings; because his life was so 
well worth writing about; because so many friends have 
sent word to me: “Some day, when you have the time, I 
hope you will sit down and write me about Carl” — the 
newer friends asking especially about his earlier years, 
the older friends wishing to know of his later interests, 


PREFACE 


xvn 


and especially of the last months, and of — what I have 
written to no one as yet — his death. I can answer them 
all this way. 

And, lastly, there is the most intimate reason of all. I 
want our children to know about their father— not just 
his academic worth, his public career, but the life he led 
from day to day. If I live till they are old enough to un¬ 
derstand, I, of course, can tell them. If not, how are they 
to know? And so, in the last instance, this is a document 
for them. 


March 17, 1919 


C. S. P. 







AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


CHAPTER I 

Such hosts of memories come tumbling in on me. 
More than fifteen years ago, on September 3, 1903, I 
met Carl Parker. He had just returned to college, two 
weeks late for the beginning of his Senior year. There 
was much concern among his friends, for he had gone 
on a two months’ hunting-trip into the wilds of Idaho, 
and had planned to return in time for college. I met 
him his first afternoon in Berkeley. He was on the top 
of a step-ladder, helping put up an awning for our 
sorority dance that evening, uttering his proverbial 
joyous banter to any one who came along, be it the 
man with the cakes, the sedate house-mother, fellow 
awning-hangers, or the girls busying about. 

Thus he was introduced to me — a Freshman of 
two weeks. He called down gayly, “ How do you do, 
young lady?” Within a week we were fast friends, I 
looking up to him as a Freshman would to a Senior, 
and a Senior seven years older than herself at that. 
Within a month I remember deciding that, if ever I 
became engaged, I would tell Carl Parker before I told 
any one else on earth! 

After about two months, he called one evening with 
his pictures of Idaho. Such a treat as my mountain- 
loving soul did have! I still have the map he drew 
that night, with the trails and camping-places marked. 


2 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


And I said, innocence itseh, u I'm going to Idaho on 
my honeymoon!” And he said, “I’m not going to 
marry till I find a girl who wants to go to Idaho on her 
honeymoon!” Then we both laughed. 

But the deciding event in his eyes was when we 
planned our first long walk in the Berkeley hills for a 
certain Saturday, November 22, and that morning it 
rained. One of the tenets I was brought up on by my 
father was that bad weather was never an excuse for 
postponing anything; so I took it for granted that we 
would start on our walk as planned. 

Carl telephoned anon and said, “Of course the 
walk is off.” 

“But why?” I asked. 

“The rain!” he answered. 

“As if that makes any difference!” 

At which he gasped a little and said all right, he’d 
be around in a minute; which he was, in his Idaho out¬ 
fit, the lunch he had suggested being entirely respon¬ 
sible for bulging one pocket. Off we started in the 
rain, and such a day as we had! We climbed Grizzly 
Peak, — only we did not know it for the fog and rain, 
— and just over the summit, in the shelter of a very 
drippy oak tree, we sat down for lunch. A fairly sanc¬ 
tified expression came over Carl’s face as he drew 
forth a rather damp and frayed-looking paper-bag — 
as a king might look who uncovered the chest of his 
most precious court jewels before a courtier deemed 
worthy of that honor. And before my puzzled and 
somewhat doubtful eyes he spread his treasure — 
jerked bear-meat, nothing but jerked bear-meat. I 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


3 

never had seen jerked anything, let alone tasted it. I 
was used to the conventional picnic sandwiches done 
up in waxed paper, plus a stuffed egg, fruit, and cake. 
I was ready for a lunch after the conservative pattern, 
and here I gazed upon a mess of most unappetizing- 
looking, wrinkled, shrunken, jerked bear-meat, the 
rain dropping down on it through the oak tree. 

I would have gasped if I had not caught the look of 
awe and reverence on Carl’s face as he gazed eagerly, 
and with what respect, on his offering. I merely took a 
hunk of what was supplied, set my teeth into it, and 
pulled. It was salty, very; it looked queer, tasted 
queer, was queer. Yet that lunch! We walked farther, 
sat now and then under other drippy trees, and at last 
decided that we must slide home, by that time soaked 
to the skin, and I minus the heel to one shoe. 

I had just got myself out of the bath and into dry 
clothes when the telephone rang. It was Carl. Could 
he come over to the house and spend the rest of the 
afternoon? It was then about four-thirty. He came, 
and from then on things were decidedly — different. 

How I should love to go into the details of that 
Freshman year of mine! I am happier right now writ¬ 
ing about it than I have been in six months. I shall 
not go into detail — only to say that the night of the 
Junior Prom of my Freshman year Carl Parker asked 
me to marry him, and two days later, up again in our 
hills, I said that I would. To think of that now — to 
think of waiting two whole days to decide whether I 
would marry Carl Parker or not!! And for fourteen 
years from the day I met him, there was never one 


4 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


small moment of misunderstanding, one day that was 
not happiness — except when we were parted. Per¬ 
haps there are people who would consider it stupid, 
boresome, to live in such peace as that. All I can an¬ 
swer is that it was not stupid, it was not boresome — 
oh, how far from it! In fact, in those early days we 
took our vow that the one thing we would never do 
was to let the world get commonplace for us; that the 
time should never come when we would not be eager 
for the start of each new day. The Kipling poem we 
loved the most, for it was the spirit of both of us, was 
“ The Long Trail.” You know the last of it: — 

The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass, 

And the Deuce knows what we may do — 

But we’re back once more on the old trail, our 
own trail, the out trail, 

We’re down, hull down, on the Long Trail— the 
trail that is always new! 


CHAPTER II 


After we decided to get married, and that as soon as 
ever we could, — I being a Freshman at the ripe and 
mature age of, as mentioned, just eighteen years, he a 
Senior, with no particular prospects, not even sure 
as yet what field he would go into, — we began dis¬ 
cussing what we might do and where we might go. 
Our main idea was to get as far away from everybody 
as we could, and live the very fullest life we could, and 
at last we decided on Persia. Why Persia? I cannot 
recall the steps now that brought us to that conclu¬ 
sion. But I know that first Christmas I sent Carl my 
picture in a frilled high-school graduation frock and a 
silk Persian flag tucked behind it, and that flag re¬ 
mained always the symbol for us that we would never 
let our lives get stale, never lose the love of adventure, 
never “settle down,” intellectually at any rate. 

Can you see my father’s face that sunny March 
day, — Charter Day it was, — when we told him we 
were engaged? (My father being the conventional, 
traditional sort who had never let me have a real 
“caller” even, lest I become interested in boys and 
think of matrimony too young!) Carl Parker was the 
first male person who was ever allowed at my home in 
the evening. He came seldom, since I was living in 
Berkeley most of the time, and anyway, we much pre¬ 
ferred prowling all over our end of creation, servant- 
girl-and-policeman fashion. Also, when I married, 


6 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


according to father it was to be some one, preferably 
an attorney of parts, about to become a judge, with a 
large bank account. Instead, at eighteen, I and this 
almost-unknown-to-him Senior stood before him and 
said, “We are going to be married,” or words to that 
general effect. And — here is where I want you to think 
of the expression on my conservative father’s face. 

Fairly early in the conversation he found breath to 
say, “And what, may I ask, are your prospects?” 

“None, just at present.” 

“And where, may I ask, are you planning to begin 
this married career you seem to contemplate?” 

“In Persia.” 

Can you see my father? “Persia?" 

“Yes, Persia.” 

“And what, for goodness’ sake, are you two going 
to do in Persia ? ’ ’ 

“We don’t know just yet, of course, but we’ll find 
something.” 

I can see my father’s point of view now, though I 
am not sure but that I shall prefer a son-in-law for our 
daughter who would contemplate absolute uncer¬ 
tainty in Persia in preference to an assured legal pro¬ 
fession in Oakland, California. It was two years before 
my father became at all sympathetic, and that condi¬ 
tion was far from enthusiastic. So it was a great joy to 
me to have him say, a few months before his death, 
“You know, Cornelia, I want you to understand that 
if I had had the world to pick from I’d have chosen 
Carl Parker for your husband. Your marriage is a con¬ 
stant source of satisfaction to me.” 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


7 

I saw Carl Parker lose his temper once, and once 
only. It was that first year that we knew each other. 
Because there was such a difference between his age 
and mine, the girls in my sorority house refused to be¬ 
lieve there could be anything serious about our going 
together so much, and took great pains to assure me 
in private that of course Carl meant nothing by his 
attentions, — to which I agreed volubly, — and they 
scolded him in private because it would spoil a Fresh¬ 
man to have a Senior so attentive. We always com¬ 
pared notes later, and were much amused. 

But words were one thing, actions another. Since 
there could be nothing serious in our relationship, 
naturally there was no reason why we should be left 
alone. If there was to be a rally or a concert, the Sen¬ 
ior sitting at the head of the dinner-table would ask, 
“ How many are going to-night with a man?” Hands. 
“How many of the girls are going together?” Hands. 
Then, to me, “Are you going with Carl?” A faint 
“Yes.” “Then we’ll all go along with you.” Carl stood 
it twice — twice he beheld this cavalcad~ bear away 
in our wake; then he gritted his teeth and announced, 
“Never again!” 

The next college occasion was a rally at the Greek 
Theatre. Again it was announced at the table that all 
the unescorted ones would accompany Carl and me. 
I foresaw trouble. When I came downstairs later, with 
my hat and coat on, there stood Carl, surrounded by 
about six girls, all hastily buttoning their gloves, his 
sister, who knew no more of the truth about Carl and 
me than the others, being one of them. Never had I 



8 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


seen such a look on Carl’s face, and I never did again. 
His feet were spread apart, his jaw was set, and he 
was glaring. When he saw me he said, “Come on!” 
and we dashed for the door. 

Sister Helen flew after us. “But Carl — the other 
girls!” 

Carl stuck his head around the corner of the front 
door, called defiantly, 11 Damn the other girls! ” banged 
the door to, and we fled. Never again were we molested. 

Carl finished his Senior year, and a full year it was 
for him. He was editor of the “Pelican,” the Univer¬ 
sity funny paper, and of the “University of California 
Magazine,” the most serious publication on the cam¬ 
pus outside the technical journals; he made every 
“honor” organization there was to make (except the 
Phi Beta Kappa); he and a fellow student wrote the 
successful Senior Extravaganza; he was a reader in 
economics, and graduated with honors. And he saw 
me every single day. 

I feel like digressing here a moment, to assail that 
old principle — which my father, along with count¬ 
less others, held so strongly — that a fellow who is 
really worth while ought to know by his Junior year 
in college just what his life-work is to be. A few with 
an early developed special aptitude do, but very few. 
Carl entered college in August, 1896, in Engineering; 
but after a term found that it had no further appeal 
for him. “But a fellow ought to stick to a thing, 
whether he likes it or not!” If one must be dogmatic, 
then I say, “A fellow should never work at anything 
he does not like.” One of the things in our case which 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


9 

brought such constant criticism from relatives and 
friends was that we changed around so much. Thank 
God we did! It took Carl Parker until he was over 
thirty before he found just the work he loved the 
most and in which his soul was content — university 
work. And he was thirty-seven before he found just 
the phase of economic study that fired him to his full 
enthusiasm — his loved field of the application of 
psychology to economics. And some one would have 
had him stick to engineering because he started in 
engineering! 

He hurt his knee broad-jumping in his Freshman 
year at college, and finally had to leave, going to 
Phoenix, Arizona, and then back to the Parker ranch 
at Vacaville for the better part of a year. The family 
was away during that time, and Carl ran the place 
alone. He returned to college in August, 1898, this 
time taking up mining. After a year’s study in mining 
he wanted the practical side. In the summer of 1899 
he worked underground in the Hidden Treasure Mine, 
Placer county, California. In 1900 he left college 
again, going to the gold and copper mines of Ross- 
land, British Columbia. From August, 1900, to May, 
1901, he worked in four different mines. It was with 
considerable feeling of pride that he always added, 
“I got to be machine man before I quit.” 

It was at that time that he became a member of the 
Western Federation of Miners — an historical fact 
which inimical capitalists later endeavored to make 
use of from time to time to do him harm. How I loved 
to listen by the hour to the stories of those grilling 


io 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


days — up at four in the pitch-dark and snow, to 
crawl to his job, with the blessing of a dear old Scotch 
landlady and a “pastie”! He would tell our sons of 
tamping in the sticks of dynamite, till their eyes 
bulged. The hundreds of times these last six months 
I ’ve wished I had in writing the stories of those days 
— of all his days, from early Vacaville times on! 
Sometimes it would be an old Vacaville crony who 
would appear, and stories would fly of those boy 
times — of the exploits up Putah Creek with Pee Wee 
Allen; of the prayer-meeting when Carl bet he could 
out-pray the minister’s son, and won; of the tediously 
thought-out assaults upon an ancient hired man on 
the place, that would fill a book and delight the heart 
of Tom Sawyer himself; and how his mother used to 
sigh and add to it all, “If only he had ever come home 
on time to his meals!” (And he has one son just like 
him. Carl’s brothers tell me: “Just give up trying to 
get Jim home on time. Mamma tried every scheme 
a human could devise to make Carl prompt for his 
meals, but nothing ever had the slightest effect. Half 
an hour past dinner-time he’d still be five miles from 
home.”) 

One article that recently appeared in a New York 
paper began: — 

“They say of him that when he was a small boy he 
displayed the same tendencies that later on made him 
great in his chosen field. His family possessed a dis¬ 
tinct tendency toward conformity and respectability, 
but Carl was a companion of every 1 alley-bum’ in 
Vacaville. His respectable friends never won him 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


11 


away from his insatiable interest in the under-dog. 
They now know it makes valid his claim to achieve¬ 
ment.” 

After the British Columbia mining days, he took 
what money he had saved, and left for Idaho, where 
he was to meet his chum, Hal Bradley, for his first 
Idaho trip — a dream of theirs for years. The Idaho 
stories he could tell — oh, why can I not remember 
them word for word? I have seen him hold a roomful 
of students in Berlin absolutely spellbound over those 
adventures — with a bit of Parker coloring, to be 
sure, which no one ever objected to. I have seen him 
with a group of staid faculty folk sitting breathless at 
his Clearwater yarns; and how he loved to tell those 
tales! Three and a half months he and Hal were in 
— hunting, fishing, jerking meat, trailing after lost 
horses, having his dreams of Idaho come true. (If 
our sons fail to have those dreams!) 

When Hal returned to college, the Wanderlust was 
still too strong in Carl; so he stopped off in Spokane, 
Washington, penniless, to try pot-luck. There were 
more tales to delight a gathering. In Spokane he took 
a hand at reporting, claiming to be a person of large 
experience, since only those of large experience were 
desired by the editor of the “Spokesman Review.” 
He was given sport, society, and the tenderloin to 
cover, at nine dollars a week. As he never could go 
anywhere without making folks love him, it was not 
long before he had his cronies among the “sports,” 
kind souls “in society ” who took him in, and at least 
one strong, loyal friend, — who called him “Bub,” 


12 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


and gave him much excellent advice that he often used 
to refer to, — who was the owner of the biggest gam¬ 
bling-joint in town. (Spokane was wide open in those 
days, and “some town.”) 

It was the society friends who seem to have saved 
his life, for nine dollars did not go far, even then. I 
have heard his hostesses tell of the meal he could 
consume. “But I’d been saving for it all day, with 
just ten cents in my pocket.” I met a pal of those days 
who used to save Carl considerable of his nine dollars 
by “smooching” his wash into his own home laundry. 

About then Carl’s older brother, Boyd, who was 
somewhat fastidious, ran into him in Spokane. He 
tells how Carl insisted he should spend the night at 
his room instead of going to a hotel. 

“Is it far from here?” 

“Oh, no!” 

So they started out with Boyd’s suitcase, and 
walked and walked through the “darndest part of 
town you ever saw.” Finally, after crossing untold 
railroad tracks and ducking around sheds and through 
alleys, they came to a rooming-house that was “a 
holy fright.” “It’s all right inside,” Carl explained. 

When they reached his room, there was one not 
over-broad bed in the corner, and a red head showing, 
snoring contentedly. 

“Who’s that?” the brother asked. 

“Oh, a fellow I picked up somewhere.” 

“Where am I to sleep?” 

“Right in here — the bed’s plenty big enough for 
three! ’ ’ 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


13 

And Boyd says, though it was 2 a.m. and miles from 
anywhere, he lit out of there as fast as he could move; 
and he adds, “ I don’t believe he even knew that red¬ 
headed boy’s name!” 

The reporting went rather lamely it seemed, how¬ 
ever. The editor said that it read amateurish, and he 
felt he would have to make a change. Carl made for 
some files where all the daily papers were kept, and 
read and re-read the yellowest of the yellow. As luck 
would have it, that very night a big fire broke out 
in a crowded apartment house. It was not in Carl’s 
“beat,” but he decided to cover it anyhow. Along 
with the firemen, he managed to get up on the roof; he 
jumped here, he flew there, demolishing the only suit 
of clothes he owned. But what an account he handed 
in! The editor discarded entirely the story of the 
reporter sent to cover the fire, ran in Carl’s, word for 
word, and raised him to twelve dollars a week. 

But just as the crown of reportorial success was 
lighting on his brow, his mother made it plain to him 
that she preferred to have him return to college. He 
bought a ticket to Vacaville, — it was just about 
Christmas time, — purchased a loaf of bread and a 
can of sardines, and with thirty cents in his pocket, 
the extent of his worldly wealth, he left for Califor¬ 
nia, traveling in a day coach all the way. I remember 
his story of how, about the end of the second day of 
bread and sardines, he cold-bloodedly and with afore¬ 
thought cultivated a man opposite him, who looked 
as if he could afford to eat; and how the man 
“came through” and asked Carl if he would have 


H 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


dinner with him in the diner. To hear him tell what 
and how much he ordered, and of the expression and 
depression of the paying host! It tided him over until 
he reached home, anyhow — never mind the host. 

All his mining experience, plus the dark side of life, 
as contrasted with society as he saw them both in 
Spokane, turned his interest to the field of economics. 
And when he entered college the next spring, it was to 
“major” in that subject. 

May and June, 1903, he worked underground in 
the coal-mines of Nanaimo. In July he met Nay 
Moran in Idaho for his second Idaho camping-trip; 
and it was on his return from this outing that I met 
him, and ate his jerked meat and loved him, and never 
stopped doing that for one second. 


CHAPTER III 


There were three boys in the Parker family, and one 
girl. Each of the other brothers had been encouraged 
to see the world, and in his turn Carl planned four¬ 
teen months in Europe, his serious objective being, on 
his return, to act as Extension Secretary to Professor 
Stephens of the University of California, who was 
preparing to organize Extension work for the first 
time in California. Carl was to study the English Ex¬ 
tension system and also prepare for some Extension 
lecturing. 

By that time, we had come a bit to our senses, and 
I had realized that since there was no money anyhow 
to marry on, and since I was so young, I had better 
stay on and graduate from college. Carl could have 
his trip to Europe and get an option, perhaps, on a 
tent in Persia. A friend was telling me recently of 
running into Carl on the street just before he left for 
Europe and asking him what he was planning to do 
for the future. Carl answered with a twinkle, “ I don’t 
know but what there’s room for an energetic up-and- 
coming young man in Asia Minor.” 

I stopped writing here to read through Carl’s Euro¬ 
pean letters, and laid aside about seven I wanted to 
quote from: the accounts of three dinners at Sidney 
and Beatrice Webb’s in London — what knowing 
them always meant to him! They, perhaps, have 
forgotten him; but meeting the Webbs and Graham 


i6 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


Wallas and that English group could be nothing 
but red-letter events to a young economic enthusiast 
one year out of college, studying Trade-Unionism in 
the London School of Economics. 

Then there was his South-African trip. He was sent 
there by a London firm, to expert a mine near Johan¬ 
nesburg. Although he cabled five times, said firm sent 
no money. The bitter disgust and anguish of those 
weeks — neither of us ever had much patience under 
such circumstances. But he experted his mine, and 
found it absolutely worthless; explored the veldt on a 
second-hand bicycle, cooked little meals of bacon and 
mush wherever he found himself, and wrote to me. 
Meanwhile he learned much, studied the coolie ques¬ 
tion, investigated mine-workings, was entertained by 
his old college mates—mining experts themselves — in 
Johannesburg. There was the letter telling of the bull 
fight at Zanzibar, or Delagoa Bay, or some seafaring 
port thereabouts, that broke his heart, it was such a 
disappointment — “it made a Kappa tea look gory 
by comparison.” And the letter that regretfully ad¬ 
mitted that perhaps, after all, Persia would not just 
do to settle down in. About that time he wanted Cali¬ 
fornia with a fearful want, and was all done with for¬ 
eign parts, and declared that any place just big enough 
for two suited him — it did not need to be as far away 
as Persia after all. At last he borrowed money to get 
back to Europe, claiming that “he had learned his 
lesson and learned it hard.” And finally he came home 
as fast as ever he could reach Berkeley — did not stop 
even to telegraph. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


17 

I had planned for months a dress I knew he would 
love to have me greet him in. It was hanging ready in 
the closet. As it was, I had started to retire — in the 
same room with a Freshman whom I was supposed to 
be “ rushing” hard — when I heard a soft whistle — 
our whistle — under my window. My heart stopped 
beating. I just grabbed a raincoat and threw it over 
me, my hair down in a braid, and in the middle of a 
sentence to the astounded Freshman I dashed out. 

My father had said, “ If neither of you changes your 
mind while Carl is away, I have no objection to your 
becoming engaged.” In about ten minutes after his 
return we were formally engaged, on a bench up in 
the Deaf and Dumb Asylum grounds — our favorite 
trysting-place. It would have been foolish to waste 
a new dress on that night. I was clad in cloth of gold 
for all Carl knew or cared, or could see in the dark, 
for that matter. The deserted Freshman was sound 
asleep when I got back—and joined another sorority. 

Thereafter, for a time, Carl went into University 
Extension, lecturing on Trade-Unionism and South 
Africa. It did not please him altogether, and finally 
my father, a lawyer himself, persuaded him to go into 
law. Carl Parker in law! How we used to shudder 
at it afterwards; but it was just one more broadening 
experience that he got out of life. 

Then came the San Francisco earthquake. That was 
the end of my Junior year, and we felt we had to be 
married when I finished college — nothing else mat¬ 
tered quite as much as that. So when an offer came 
out of a clear sky from Halsey and Company, for Carl 




i8 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


to be a bond-salesman on a salary that assured matri¬ 
mony within a year, though in no affluence, and the 
bottom all out of the law business and no enthusiasm 
for it anyway, we held a consultation and decided for 
bonds and marriage. What a bond-salesman Carl 
made! Those who knew him knew what has been re¬ 
ferred to as 'The magic of his personality,” and could 
understand how he was having the whole of a small 
country town asking him to dinner on his second visit. 

I somehow got through my Senior year; but how 
the days dragged! For all I could think of was Carl, 
Carl, Carl, and getting married. Yet no one — no one 
on this earth — ever had the fun out of their engaged 
days that we did, when we were together. Carl used to 
say that the accumulated expenses of courting me for 
almost four years came to $10.25. He just guessed at 
$10.25, though any cheap figure would have done. We 
just did not care about doing things that happened to 
cost money. We never did care in our lives, and never 
would have cared, no matter what our income might 
be. Undoubtedly that was the main reason we were so 
blissful on such a small salary in University work — 
we could never think, at the time, of anything much 
we were doing without. I remember that the happiest 
Christmas we almost ever had was over in the coun¬ 
try, when we spent under two dollars for all of us. We 
were absolutely down to bed-rock that year anyway. 
(It was just after we paid off our European debt.) 
Carl gave me a book, "The Pastor’s Wife,” and we 
gloated over it together all Christmas afternoon! We 
gave each of the boys a ten-cent cap-pistol and five 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


19 

cents’ worth of caps — they were in their Paradise. 
I mended three shirts of Carl’s that had been in my 
basket so long they were really like new to him, — 
he’d forgotten he owned them! — laundered them, 
and hung the trio, tied in tissue paper and red ribbon, 
on the tree. That was a Christmas! 

He used to claim, too, that, as I got so excited over 
five cents’ worth of gum-drops, there was no use in¬ 
vesting in a dollar’s worth of French mixed candy — 
especially if one had n’t the dollar. We always loved 
tramping more than anything else, and just prowling 
around the streets arm-in-arm, ending perhaps with 
an ice-cream soda. Not over-costly, any of it. I have 
kept some little reminder of almost every spree we 
took in our four engaged years — it is a book of sheer 
joy from cover to cover. Except always, always the 
need of saying good-bye: it got so that it seemed 
almost impossible to say it. 

And then came the day when it did not have to 
be said each time — that day of days, September 7, 
1907, when we were married. Idaho for our honey¬ 
moon had to be abandoned, as three weeks was the 
longest vacation period we could wring from a soul¬ 
less bond-house. But not even Idaho could have 
brought us more joy than our seventy-five-mile trip 
up the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. We hired an 
old buckboard and two ancient, almost immobile, so- 
called horses, — they needed scant attention, — and 
with provisions, gun, rods, and sleeping-bags, we 
started forth. The woods were in their autumn glory, 
the fish were biting, corn was ripe along the road- 



20 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


side, and apples — Rogue River apples — made red 
blotches under every tree. “Help yourselves!” the 
farmers would sing out, or would not sing out. It was 
all one to us. 

I found that, along with his every other accomplish¬ 
ment, I had married an expert camp cook. He found 
that he had married a person who could not even 
boil rice. The first night out on our trip, Carl said, 
“You start the rice while I tend to the horses.” He 
knew I could not cook — I had planned to take a 
course in Domestic Science on graduation; however, 
he preferred to marry me earlier, inexperienced, than 
later, experienced. But evidently he thought even a 
low-grade moron could boil rice. The bride of his 
heart did not know that rice swelled when it boiled. 
We were hungry, we would want lots of rice, so I put 
lots in. By the time Carl came back I had partly 
cooked rice in every utensil we owned, including the 
coffee-pot and the wash-basin. And still he loved me! 

That honeymoon! Lazy horses poking unprodded 
along an almost deserted mountain road; glimpses of 
the river lined with autumn reds and yellows; camp 
made toward evening in any spot that looked appeal¬ 
ing — and all spots looked appealing; two fish-rods 
out; consultation as to flies; leave-taking for half an 
hour’s parting, while one went up the river to try his 
luck, one down. Joyous reunion, with much luck or 
little luck, but always enough for supper: trout rolled 
in cornmeal and fried, corn on the cob just garnered 
from a willing or unwilling farmer that afternoon, 
corn-bread, — the most luscious corn-bread in the 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


2i 


world, baked camper-style by the man of the party, 
— and red, red apples, eaten by two people who had 
waited four years for just that. Evenings in a sandy 
nook by the river’s edge, watching the stars come out 
above the water. Adventures, such as losing Choc- 
olada, the brown seventy-eight-year-old horse, and 
finding her up to her neck in a deep stream running 
through a grassy meadow with perpendicular banks 
on either side. We walked miles till we found a farmer. 
With the aid of himself and his tools, plus a stout rope 
and a tree, in an afternoon’s time we dug and pulled 
and hauled and yanked Chocolada up and out onto 
dry land, more nearly dead than ever by that time. 
The ancient senile had just fallen in while drinking. 

We made a permanent camp for one week seventy- 
five miles up the river, in a spot so deserted that we 
had to cut the road through to reach it. There we 
laundered our change of overalls and odds and ends, 
using the largest cooking utensil for boiling what was 
boiled, and all the food tasted of Ivory soap for two 
days; but we did not mind even that. And then, after 
three weeks, back to skirts and collars and civiliza¬ 
tion, and a continued honeymoon from Medford, 
Oregon, to Seattle, Washington, doing all the country 
banks en route . In Portland we had to be separated 
for one whole day — it seemed nothing short of 
harrowing. 

Then came Seattle and house-hunting. We had a 
hundred dollars a month to live on, and every apart¬ 
ment we looked at rented for from sixty dollars up. 
Finally, in despair, we took two wee rooms, a wee-er 


22 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


kitchen, and bath, for forty dollars. It was just before 
the panic in 1907, and rents were exorbitant. And 
from having seventy-five dollars spending money a 
month before I was married, I jumped to keeping 
two of us on sixty dollars, which was what was left 
after the rent was paid. I am not rationalizing when 
I say I am glad that we did not have a cent more. It 
was a real sporting event to make both ends meet! 
And we did it, and saved a dollar or so, just to show 
we could. Any and every thing we commandeered to 
help maintain our solvency. Seattle was quite given 
to food fairs in those days, and we kept a weather 
eye out for such. We would eat no lunch, make for the 
Food Show about three, nibble at samples all after¬ 
noon, and come home well-fed about eight, having 
bought enough necessities here and there to keep our 
consciences from hurting. 

Much of the time Carl had to be on the road selling 
bonds, and we almost grieved our hearts out over 
that. In fact, we got desperate, and when Carl was 
offered an assistant cashiership in a bank in Ellens- 
burg, Washington, we were just about to accept it, 
when the panic came, and it was all for retrenchment 
in banks. Then we planned farming, planned it with 
determination. It was too awful, those good-byes. 
Each got worse and harder than the last. We had 
divine days in between, to be sure, when we’d prowl 
out into the woods around the city, with a picnic lunch, 
or bummel along the waterfront, ending at a counter 
we knew, which produced, or the man behind it pro¬ 
duced, delectable and cheap clubhouse sandwiches. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 23 

The bond business, and business conditions gen¬ 
erally in the Northwest, got worse and worse. In 
March, after six months of Seattle, we were called 
back to the San Francisco office. Business results were 
better, Carl’s salary was raised considerably, but 
there were still separations. 


CHAPTER IV 


On July 3, the Marvelous Son was born, and never 
was there such a father. Even the trained nurse, hard¬ 
ened to new fathers by years of experience, admitted 
that she never had seen any one take parenthood quite 
so hard. Four times in the night he crept in to see if 
the baby was surely breathing. We were in a very 
quiet neighborhood, yet the next day, being Fourth 
of July, now and then a pop would be heard. At each 
report of a cap-pistol a block away, Carl would dash 
out and vehemently protest to a group of scornful 
youngsters that they would wake our son. As if a one- 
day-old baby would seriously consider waking if a 
giant fire-cracker went off under his bed! 

Those were magic days. Three of us in the family 
instead of two — and separations harder than ever. 
Once in all the ten and a half years we were married I 
saw Carl Parker downright discouraged over his own 
affairs, and that was the day I met him down town in 
Oakland and he announced that he just could not 
stand the bond business any longer. He had come to 
dislike it heartily as a business; and then, leaving the 
boy and me was not worth the whole financial world 
put together. Since his European experience, — meet¬ 
ing the Webbs and their kind, — he had had a han¬ 
kering for University work, but he felt that the money 
return was so small he simply could not contemplate 
raising a family on it. But now we were desperate. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


25 

We longed for a life that would give us the maximum 
chance to be together. Cold-bloodedly we decided 
that University work would give us that opportunity, 
and the long vacations would give us our mountains. 

The work itself made its strong appeal, too. Pro¬ 
fessor Henry Morse Stephens and Professor Miller of 
the University of California had long urged Carl to go 
into teaching; and at last we decided that, even if 
it meant living on husks and skimmed milk all our 
days, at least we would be eating what there was to 
eat together, three meals a day every day. We cashed 
in our savings, we drew on everything there was to 
draw on, and on February 1, 1909, the three of us 
embarked for Harvard — with fifty-six dollars and 
seventy-five cents excess-baggage to pay at the depot, 
such young ignoramuses we were. 

That trip East was worth any future hardship we 
might have reaped. Our seven-months-old baby was 
one of the young saints of the world — not once in 
the five days did he peep. We’d pin him securely in 
the lower berth of our compartment for his nap, and 
back we would fly to the corner of the rear platform 
of the observation car, and gloat, just gloat, over how 
we had come into the inheritance of all creation. We 
owned the world. And I, who had never been farther 
from my California home town than Seattle, who 
never had seen real snow, except that Christmas when 
we spent four days at the Scenic Hot Springs in the 
Cascades, and skied and sledded and spilled around 
like six-year-olds! But stretches and stretches of 
snow! And then, just traveling, and together! 



26 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


And to be in Boston! We took a room with a bath 
in the Copley Square Hotel. The first evening we ar¬ 
rived, Nandy (Carleton, Jr.) rolled off the bed; so 
when we went gallivanting about Boston, shopping 
for the new home, we left him in the bath-tub where 
he could not fall out. We padded it well with pillows, 
there was a big window letting in plenty of fresh air, 
and we instructed the chambermaid to peep at him 
now and then. And there we would leave him, well- 
nourished and asleep. (By the time that story had 
been passed around by enough people in the home 
town, it developed that one day the baby — just 
seven months old, remember — got up and turned on 
the water, and was found by the chambermaid sinking 
for the third time.) 

Something happened to the draft from the home 
bank, which should have reached Boston almost at 
the same time we did. We gazed into the family 
pocket-book one fine morning, to find it, to all intents 
and purposes, empty. Hurried meeting of the finance 
committee. By unanimous consent of all present, we 
decided — as many another mortal in a strange town 
has decided — on the pawnshop. I wonder if my dear 
grandmother will read this — she probably will. Carl 
first submitted his gold watch — the baby had 
dropped it once, and it had shrunk thereby in the eyes 
of the pawnshop man, though not in ours. The only 
other valuable we had along with us was my grand¬ 
mother’s wedding present to me, which had been my 
grandfather’s wedding present to her — a glorious 
old-fashioned breast-pin. We were allowed fifty dol- 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


2 7 

lars on it, which saved the day. What will my grand¬ 
mother say when she knows that her bridal gift re¬ 
sided for some days in a Boston pawnshop? 

We moved out to Cambridge in due time, and set¬ 
tled at Bromley Court, on the very edge of the Yard. 
We thrilled to all of it — we drank in every ounce of 
dignity and tradition the place afforded, and our wild 
Western souls exulted. We knew no one when we 
reached Boston, but our first Sunday we were invited 
to dinner in Cambridge by two people who were, ever 
after, our cordial, faithful friends — Mr. and Mrs. 
John Graham Brooks. They made us feel at once that 
Cambridge was not the socially icy place it is painted 
in song and story. Then I remember the afternoon 
that I had a week’s wash strung on an improvised line 
back and forth from one end of our apartment to the 
other. Just as I hung the last damp garment, the bell 
rang, and there stood an immaculate gentleman in a 
cutaway and silk hat, who had come to call — an old 
friend of my mother’s. He ducked under wet clothes, 
and we set two chairs where we could see each other, 
and yet nothing was dripping down either of our 
necks; and there we conversed, and he ended by in¬ 
viting us both to dinner — on Marlborough Street, at 
that! He must have loved my mother very dearly to 
have sought further acquaintance with folk who hung 
the family wash in the hall and the living-room and 
dining-room. His house on Marlborough Street! We 
boldly and excitedly figured up on the way home, that 
they spent on the one meal they fed us more than it 
cost us to live for two weeks — they honestly did. 



28 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


Then there was the dear “ Jello” lady at the mar¬ 
ket. I wish she would somehow happen to read this, 
so as to know that we have never forgotten her. 
Every Saturday the three of us went to the market, 
and there was the Jello lady with her samples. The 
helpings she dished for us each time! She brought the 
man to whom she was engaged to call on us just before 
we left. I wonder if they got married, and where they 
are, and if she still remembers us. She used to say she 
just waited for Saturdays and our coming. Then there 
was dear Granny Jones, who kept a boarding-house 
half a block away. I do not remember how we came 
to know her, but some good angel saw to it. She used 
to send around little bowls of luscious dessert, and 
half a pie, or some hot muffins. Then I was always 
grateful also — for it made such a good story, and it 
was true — to the New England wife of a fellow grad¬ 
uate student who remarked, when I told her we had 
one baby and another on the way, “How interesting 
— just like the slums!” 

We did our own work, of course, and we lived on 
next to nothing. I wonder now how we kept so well 
that year. Of course, we fed the baby everything he 
should have, — according to Holt in those days, — 
and we ate the mutton left from his broth and the 
beef after the juice had been squeezed out of it for 
him, and bought storage eggs ourselves, and queer 
butter out of a barrel, and were absolutely, absolutely 
blissful. Perhaps we should have spent more on food 
and less on baseball. I am glad we did not. Almost 
every Saturday afternoon that first semester we fared 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


29 

forth early, Nandy in his go-cart, to get a seat in the 
front row of the baseball grandstand. I remember one 
Saturday we were late, front seats all taken. We had 
to pack baby and go-cart more than half-way up to 
the top. There we barricaded him, still in the go-cart, 
in the middle of the aisle. Along about the seventh inn¬ 
ing, the game waxed particularly exciting — we were 
beside ourselves with enthusiasm. Fellow onlookers 
seemed even more excited — they called out things 

— they seemed to be calling in our direction. Fine 
parents we were — there was Nandy, go-cart and all, 
bumpety-bumping down the grandstand steps. 

I remember again the Stadium on the day of the 
big track meet. Every time the official announcer 
would put the megaphone to his mouth, to call out 
winners and time to a hushed and eager throng, 
Nandy, not yet a year old, would begin to squeal at 
the top of his lungs for joy. Nobody could hear a word 
the official said. We were as distressed as any one 

— we, too, had pencils poised to jot down records. 

Carl studied very hard. The first few weeks, until 

we got used to the new wonder of things, he used to 
run home from college whenever he had a spare 
minute, just to be sure he was that near. At that time 
he was rather preparing to go into Transportation as 
his main economic subject. But by the end of the year 
he knew Labor would be his love. (His first published 
economic article was a short one that appeared in the 
“ Quarterly Journal of Economics” for May, 1910, 
on “The Decline of Trade-Union Membership.”) We 
had a tragic summer. 



3 ° 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


Carl felt that he must take his Master’s degree, but 
he had no foreign language. Three terrible, wicked, 
unforgivable professors assured him that, if he could 
be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he 
could get enough German to pass the examination for 
the A.M. We believed them, and he went; though of 
all the partings we ever had, that was the very worst. 
Almost at the last he just could not go; but we were 
so sure that it would solve the whole A.M. problem. 
He went third class on a German steamer, since we 
had money for nothing better. The food did distress 
even his unfinicky soul. After a particularly sad offer¬ 
ing of salt herring, uncooked, on a particularly rough 
day, he wrote, “I find I am not a good Hamburger 
German. The latter eat all things in all weather.” 

Oh, the misery of that summer! We never talked 
about it much. He went to Freiburg, to a German 
cobbler’s family, but later changed, as the cobbler’s 
son looked upon him as a dispensation of Providence, 
sent to practise his English upon. His heart was break¬ 
ing, and mine was breaking, and he was working at 
German (and languages came fearfully hard for him) 
morning, afternoon, and night, with two lessons a 
day, his only diversion being a daily walk up a hill, 
with a cake of soap and a towel, to a secluded water¬ 
fall he discovered. He wrote a letter and a postcard 
a day to the babe and me. I have just re-read all of 
them, and my heart aches afresh for the homesickness 
that summer meant to both of us. 

He got back two days before our wedding anniver¬ 
sary — days like those first few after our reunion are 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


31 

not given to many mortals. I would say no one had 
ever tasted such joy. The baby gurgled about, and 
was kissed within an inch of his life. The Jello lady 
sent around a dessert of sixteen different colors, more 
or less, big enough for a family of eight, as her wel¬ 
come home. 

About six weeks later we called our beloved Dr. 

J-from a banquet he had long looked forward to, 

in order to officiate at the birth of our second, known 
as Thomas-Elizabeth up to October 17, but from 
about ten-thirty that night as James Stratton Parker. 
We named him after my grandfather, for the simple 
reason that we liked the name Jim. How we chuckled 
when my father’s congratulatory telegram came, in 
which he claimed pleasure at having the boy named 
after his father, but cautioned us never to allow him 
to be nicknamed. I remember the boresome youth 
who used to call, week in week out, — always just 
before a meal, — and we were so hard up, and got so 
that we resented feeding such an impossible person so 
many times. He dropped in at noon Friday the 17th, 
for lunch. A few days later Carl met him on the street 
and announced rapturously the arrival of the new 
son. The impossible person hemmed and stammered: 
“Why — er — when did it arrive?” Carl, all beams, 
replied, “The very evening of the day you were at 
our house for lunch! ” We never laid eyes on that man 
again! We were almost four months longer in Cam¬ 
bridge, but never did he step foot inside our apart¬ 
ment. I wish some one could have psycho-analyzed 
him, but it’s too late now. He died about a year after 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


3 2 

we left Cambridge. I always felt that he never got 
over the shock of having escaped Jim’s arrival by 
such a narrow margin. ; 

And right here I must tell of Dr. J-. He was rec¬ 

ommended as the best doctor in Cambridge, but very 
expensive. “We may have to economize in everything 
on earth,” said Carl, “ but we’ll never economize on 

doctors.” So we had Dr. J-, had him for all the 

minor upsets that families need doctors for; had him 
when Jim was born; had him through a queer fever 
Nandy developed that lasted some time; had him 
through a bad case of grippe I got (this was at Christ¬ 
mastime, and Carl took care of both babies, did all 
the cooking, even to the Christmas turkey I was well 
enough to eat by then, got up every two hours for 
three nights to change an ice-pack I had to have — 
that’s the kind of man he was!); had him vaccinate 
both children; and then, just before we left Cambridge, 
we sat and held his bill, afraid to open the envelope. 
At length we gathered our courage, and gazed upon 
charges of sixty-five dollars for everything, with a 
wonderful note which said that, if we would be incon¬ 
venienced in paying that, he would not mind at all if 
he got nothing. 

Such excitement! We had expected two hundred 
dollars at the least! We tore out and bought ten cents’ 
worth of doughnuts, to celebrate. When we exclaimed 
to him over his goodness, — of course we paid the 
sixty-five dollars, — all he said was: “Do you think 
a doctor is blind? And does a man go steerage to 
Europe if he has a lot of money in the bank?” Bless 





AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


33 


that doctor’s heart! Bless all doctors’ hearts! We 
went through our married life in the days of our finan¬ 
cial slimness, with kindness shown us by every doctor 
we ever had. I remember our Heidelberg German 
doctor sent us a bill for a year of a dollar and a half. 
And even in our more prosperous days, at Carl’s last 
illness, with that good Seattle doctor calling day and 
night, and caring for me after Carl’s death, he refused 
to send any bill for anything. And a little later, when 
I paid a long overdue bill to our blessed Oakland 
doctor for a tonsil operation, he sent the check back 
torn in two. Bless doctors! 

When we left for Harvard, we had an idea that per¬ 
haps one year of graduate work would be sufficient. 
Naturally, about two months was enough to show us 
that one year would get us nowhere. Could we finance 
an added year at, perhaps, Wisconsin? And then, in 
November, Professor Miller of Berkeley called to talk 
things over with Carl. Anon he remarked, more or less 
casually, “The thing for you to do is to have a year’s 
study in Germany,” and proceeded to enlarge on that 
idea. We sat dumb, and the minute the door was 
closed after him, we flopped. “What was the man 
thinking of — to suggest a year in Germany, when 
we have no money and two babies, one not a year 
and a half, and one six weeks old!” Preposterous! 

That was Saturday afternoon. By Monday morning 
we had decided we would go! Thereupon we wrote 
West to finance the plan, and got beautifully sat upon 
for our “notions.” If we needed money, we had better 
give up this whole fool University idea and get a 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


34 

decent man-sized job. And then we wrote my father, 
— or, rather, I wrote him without telling Carl till 
after the letter was mailed, — and bless his heart! he 
replied with a fat God-bless-you-my-children regis¬ 
tered letter, with check enclosed, agreeing to my stip¬ 
ulation that it should be a six-per-cent business affair. 
Suppose we could not have raised that money — sup¬ 
pose our lives had been minus that German experi¬ 
ence! Bless fathers! They may scold and fuss at ro¬ 
mance, and have “good sensible ideas of their own” 
on such matters, but — bless fathers! 



CHAPTER V 


We finished our year at Harvard, giving up the A.M. 
idea for the present. Carl got A’s in every subject and 
was asked to take a teaching fellowship under Ripley; 
but it was Europe for us. We set forth February 22, 
1909, in a big snowstorm, with two babies, and one 
thousand six hundred and seventy-six bundles, bags, 
and presents. Jim was in one of those fur-bags that 
babies use in the East. Everything we were about to 
forget the last minute got shoved into that bag with 
Jim, and it surely began to look as if we had brought 
a young and very lumpy mastodon into the world! 

We went by boat from Boston to New York, and 
sailed on the Pennsylvania February 24. People wrote 
us in those days: “ You two brave people — think of 
starting to Europe with two babies!” Brave was the 
last word to use. Had we worried or had fears over 
anything, and yet fared forth, we should perhaps have 
been brave. As it was, I can feel again the sensation 
of leaving New York, gazing back on the city build¬ 
ings and bridges bathed in sunshine after the storm. 
Exultant joy was in our hearts, that was all. Not one 
worry, not one concern, not one small drop of home¬ 
sickness. We were to see Europe together, years be¬ 
fore we had dreamed it possible. It just seemed too 
glorious to be true. “Brave”? Far from it. Simply 
eager, glowing, filled to the brim with a determination 
to drain every day to the full. 


36 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


I discovered that, while my husband had married a 
female who could not cook rice (though she learned), 
I had taken unto myself a spouse who curled up green 
half a day out on the ocean, and stayed that way for 
about six days. He tried so desperately to help with 
the babies, but it always made matters worse. If I had 
turned green, too — But babies and I prospered with¬ 
out interruption, though some ants did try to eat 
Jim’s scalp off one night — “sugar ants” the doctor 
called them. “They knew their business,” our dad re¬ 
marked. We were three days late getting into Ham¬ 
burg — fourteen days on the ocean, all told. And then 
to be in Hamburg — in Germany — in Europe! I re¬ 
member our first meal in the queer little cheap hotel 
we rooted out. “Eier” was the only word on the bill 
of fare we could make out, so Carl brushed up his 
German and ordered four for us, fried. And the waiter 
brought four each. He probably declared for years 
that all Americans always eat four fried eggs each 
and every night for supper. 

We headed for Leipzig at once, and there Carl 
unearthed the Pension Schroter on Sophien Platz. 
There we had two rooms and all the food we could eat, 

— far too much for us to eat, and oh! so delicious, — 
for fifty-five dollars a month for the entire family, al¬ 
though Jim hardly ranked as yet, economically speak¬ 
ing, as part of the consuming public. We drained 
Leipzig to the dregs — a good German idiom. Carl 
worked at his German steadily, almost frantically,with 
a lesson every day along with all his university work 

— a seven o’clock lecture by Bucher every morning 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


37 

being the cheery start for the day, and we blocks and 
blocks from the University. I think of Carl through 
those days with extra pride, though it is hard to de¬ 
cide that I was ever prouder of him at one time than 
another. But he strained and labored without ceasing 
at such an uninspiring job. All his hard study that 
broken-hearted summer at Freiburg had given him 
no single word of an economic vocabulary. In Leipzig 
he listened hour by hour to the lectures of his German 
professors, sometimes not understanding an impor¬ 
tant word for several days, yet exerting every intel¬ 
lectual muscle to get some light in his darkness. Then, 
for hours each day and almost every evening, it was 
grammar, grammar, grammar, till he wondered at 
times if all life meant an understanding of the sub¬ 
junctive. Then, little by little, rays of hope. “1 caught 

five words in-’s lecture to-day!” Then it was ten, 

then twenty. Never a lecture of any day did he miss. 

We stole moments for joy along the way. First, of 
course, there was the opera — grand opera at twenty- 
five cents a seat. How Wagner bored us at first — ex¬ 
cept the parts here and there that we had known all 
our lives. Neither of us had had any musical education 
to speak of; each of us got great joy out of what we 
considered “good” music, but which was evidently 
low-brow. And Wagner at first was too much for us. 
That night in Leipzig we heard the “Walkiire!” — 
utterly aghast and rather impatient at so much non- 
understandable noise. Then we would drop down 
to “Carmen,” “La Boheme,” Hoffman’s “Erzahl- 
ung,” and think, “This is life!” Each night that we 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


38 

spared for a spree we sought out some beer-hall — as 
unfrequented a one as possible, to get all the local 
color we could. 

Once Carl decided that, as long as we had come so 
far, I must get a glimpse of real European night-life 
— it might startle me a bit, but would do no harm. 
So, after due deliberation, he led me to the Cafe 
Bauer, the reputed wild and questionable resort of 
Leipzig night-life, though the pension glanced ceiling- 
wards and sighed and shook their heads. I do not 
know just what I did expect to see, but I know that 
what I saw was countless stolid family parties — on 
all sides grandmas and grandpas and sons and daugh¬ 
ters, and the babies in high chairs beating the tables 
with spoons. It was quite the most moral atmosphere 
we ever found ourselves in. That is what you get for 
deliberately setting out to see the wickedness of the 
world! 

From Leipzig we went to Berlin. We did not want 
to go to Berlin — Jena was the spot we had in mind. 
Just as a few months at Harvard showed us that one 
year there would be but a mere start, so one semester 
in Germany showed us that one year there would get 
us nowhere. We must stay longer, — from one to two 
years longer, — but how, alas, how finance it? That 
eternal question! We finally decided that, if we took 
the next semester or so in Berlin, Carl could earn 
money enough coaching to keep us going without 
having to borrow more. So to Berlin we went. We 
accomplished our financial purpose, but at too great 
a cost. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


39 

In Berlin we found a small furnished apartment on 
the ground floor of a Gartenhaus in Charlottenburg 
— Mommsen Strasse it was. At once Carl started out 
to find coaching; and how he found it always seemed 
to me an illustration of the way he could succeed at 
anything anywhere. We knew no one in Berlin. First 
he went to the minister of the American church; he in 
turn gave him names of Americans who might want 
coaching, and then Carl looked up those people. In 
about two months he had all the coaching he could 
possibly handle, and we could have stayed indefin¬ 
itely in Berlin in comfort, for Carl was making over 
one hundred dollars a month, and that in his spare 
time. 

But the agony of those months: to be in Germany 
and yet get so little Germany out of it! We had splen¬ 
did letters of introduction to German people, from 
German friends we had made in Leipzig, but we could 
not find a chance even to present them. Carl coached 
three youngsters in the three R’s; he was preparing 
two of the age just above, for college; he had one 
American youth, who had ambitions to burst out 
monthly in the “Saturday Evening Post” stories; 
there was a class of five middle-aged women, who 
wanted Shakespeare, and got it; two classes in Current 
Events; one group of Christian Scientists, who put in 
a modest demand for the history of the world. I re¬ 
member Carl had led them up to Pepin the Short 
when we left Berlin. He contracted everything and 
anything except one group who desired a course of 
lectures on Pragmatism. I do not think he had ever 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


40 

heard of the term then, but he took one look at the 
lay of the land and said — not so! In his last years, 
when he became such a worshiper at the shrine of 
William James and John Dewey, we often used to 
laugh at his Berlin profanity over the very idea of 
ever getting a word of such “bunk” into his head. 

But think of the strain it all meant — lessons and 
lessons every day, on every subject under heaven, 
and in every spare minute continued grinding at his 
German, and, of course, every day numerous hours at 
the University, and so little time for sprees together. 
We assumed in our prosperity the luxury of a maid 
— the unparalleled Anna Bederke aus Rothenburg, 
Kreis Bumps (?), Posen, at four dollars a month, who 
for a year and a half was the amusement and desper¬ 
ation of ourselves and our friends. Dear, crooked¬ 
nosed, one-good-eye Anna! She adored the ground we 
walked on. Our German friends told us we had ruined 
her forever — she would never be fit for the discipline 
of a German household again. Since war was first de¬ 
clared we have lost all track of Anna. Was her Poland 
home in the devastated country? Did she marry a 
soldier, and is she too, perhaps, a widow? Faithful 
Anna, do not think for one minute you will ever be 
forgotten by the Parkers. 

With Anna to leave the young with now and then, 
I was able to get in two sprees a week with Carl. 
Every Wednesday and Saturday noon I met him at 
the University and we had lunch together. Usually on 
Wednesdays we ate at the Cafe Rheingold, the spot I 
think of with most affection as I look back on Berlin. 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


4* 


We used to eat in the “Shell Room” — an individual 
chicken-and-rice pie (as much chicken as rice), a vege¬ 
table, and a glass of beer each, for thirty-five cents for 
both. Saturdays we hunted for different smaller out- 
of-the-way restaurants. Wednesday nights “ Uncle 
K.” of the University of Wisconsin always came to 
supper, bringing a thirty-five-cent rebate his landlady 
allowed him when he ate out; and we had chicken 
every Wednesday night, which cost — a fat one — 
never more than fifty cents. (It was Uncle K. who 
wrote, “The world is so different with Carl gone!”) 
Once we rented bicycles and rode all through the Tier- 
garten, Carl and I, with the expected stiffness and 
soreness next day. 

Then there was Christmas in Berlin. Three friends 
traveled up from Rome to be with us, two students 
came from Leipzig, and four from Berlin — eleven for 
dinner, and four chairs all told. It was a regular 
“La Boh$me” festival — one guest appearing with 
a bottle of wine under his arm, another with a jar of 
caviare sent him from Russia. We had a gay week 
of it after Christmas, when the whole eleven of us 
went on some Dutch-treat spree every night, before 
going back to our studies. 

Then came those last grueling months in Berlin, 
when Carl had a breakdown, and I got sick nursing 
him and had to go to a German hospital; and while I 
was there Jim was threatened with pneumonia and 
Nandy got tonsillitis. In the midst of it all the lease 
expired on our Wohnung, and Carl and Anna had to 
move the family out. We decided that we had had all 




4 2 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


we wanted of coaching in Berlin, — we came to that 
conclusion before any of the breakdowns, — threw 
our pride to the winds, borrowed more money from 
my good father, and as soon as the family was well 
enough to travel, we made for our ever-to-be-adored 
Heidelberg. 



CHAPTER VI 


Here I sit back, and words fail me. I see that year as 
a kaleidoscope of one joyful day after another, each 
rushing by and leaving the memory that we both al¬ 
ways had, of the most perfect year that was ever given 
to mortals on earth. I remember our eighth wedding 
anniversary in Berkeley. We had been going night 
after night until we were tired of going anywhere, — 
engagements seemed to have heaped up, — so we 
decided that the very happiest way we could cele¬ 
brate that most-to-be-celebrated of all dates was just 
to stay at home, plug the telephone, pull down the 
blinds, and have an evening by ourselves. Then we 
got out everything that we kept as mementos of our 
European days, and went over them — all the post¬ 
cards, memory-books, theatre and opera programmes, 
etc., and, lastly, read my diary — I had kept a record 
of every day in Europe. When we came to that year 
in Heidelberg, we just could not believe our own eyes. 
How had we ever managed to pack a year so full, and 
live to tell the tale? I wish I could write a story of just 
that year. We swore an oath in Berlin that we would 
make Heidelberg mean Germany to us — no English- 
speaking, no Americans. As far as it lay in our power, 
we lived up to it. Carl and I spoke only German to 
each other and to the children, and we shunned our 
fellow countrymen as if they had had the plague. 
And Carl, in the characteristic way he had, set out 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


44 

to fill our lives with all the real German life we could 
get into them, not waiting for that life to come of itself 
— which it might never have done. 

One afternoon, on his way home from the Univer- 
sity, he discovered in a back alley the Weiser Boch, 
a little restaurant and beer-hall so full of local color 
that it “ hollered.” No, it did not holler: it was too 
real for that. It was sombre and carved up — it 
whispered. Carl made immediate friends, in the way 
he had, with the portly Frau and Herr who ran the 
Weiser Boch: they desired to meet me, they desired 
to see the Kinder, and would not the Herr Student 
like to have the Weiser Boch lady mention his name 
to some of the German students who dropped in? 

j » 

Carl left his card, and wondered if anything would 
come of it. 

The very next afternoon, — such a glowing account 
of the Amerikaner the Weiser Boch lady must have 
given, — a real truly German student, in his corps 
cap and ribbons, called at our home — the stiffest, 
most decorous heel-clicking German student I ever 
was to see. His embarrassment was great when he 
discovered that Carl was out, and I seemed to take it 
quite for granted that he was to sit down for a mo¬ 
ment and visit with me. He fell over everything. But 
we visited, and I was able to gather that his corps 
wished Herr Student Par-r-r-ker to have beer with 
them the following evening. Then he bowed himself 
backwards and out, and fled. 

I could scarce wait for Carl to get home — it was 
too good to be true. And that was but the beginning, 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


4 5 

Invitation after invitation came to Carl, first from one 
corps, then from another; almost every Saturday 
night he saw German student-life first hand some¬ 
where, and at least one day a week he was invited to 
the duels in the Hirsch Gasse. Little by little we got 
the students to our Wohnung; then we got chummier 
and chummier, till we would walk up Haupt Strasse 
saluting here, passing a word there, invited to some 
student function one night, another affair another 
night. The students who lived in Heidelberg had us 
meet their families, and those who were batching in 
Heidelberg often had us come to their rooms. We made 
friendships during that year that nothing could ever 
mar. 

It is two years now since we received the last letter 
from any Heidelberg chum. Are they all killed, per¬ 
haps? And when we can communicate again, after the 
war, think of what I must write them! Carl was a 
revelation to most of them — they would talk about 
him to me, and ask if all Americans were like him, so 
fresh in spirit, so clean, so sincere, so full of fun, and, 
with it all, doing the finest work of all of them but one 
in the University. 

The economics students tried to think of some way 
of influencing Alfred Weber to give another course of 
lectures at the University. He was in retirement at 
Heidelberg, but still the adored of the students. Fi¬ 
nally, they decided that a committee of three should 
represent them and make a personal appeal. Carl was 
one of the three chosen. The report soon flew around, 
how, in Weber’s august presence, the Amerikaner had 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


46 

stood with his hands in his pockets — even sat for a 
few moments on the edge of Weber’s desk. The two 
Germans, posed like ramrods, expected to see such in¬ 
formality shoved out bodily. Instead, when they took 
their leave, the Herr Professor had actually patted 
the Amerikaner on the shoulder, and said he guessed 
he would give the lectures. 

Then his report in Gothein’s Seminar, which went 
so well that I fairly burst with pride. He had worked 
day and night on that. I was to meet him at eight 
after it had been given, and we were to have a cele¬ 
bration. I was standing by the entrance to the Uni¬ 
versity building when out came an enthused group of 
jabbering German students, Carl in their midst. They 
were patting him on the back, shaking his hands 
furiously; and when they saw me, they rushed to tell 
me of Carl’s success and how Gothein had said be¬ 
fore all that it had been the best paper presented that 
semester. 

I find myself smiling as I write this — I was too 
happy that night to eat. 

The Sunday trips we made up the Neckar: each 
morning early we would take the train and ride to 
where we had walked the Sunday previous; then we 
would tramp as far as we could, — meaning until 
dark, — have lunch at some untouristed inn along the 
road, or perhaps eat a picnic lunch of our own in some 
old castle ruin, and then ride home. Oh, those Sun¬ 
days! I tell you no two people in all this world, since 
people were, have ever had one day like those Sun¬ 
days. And we had them almost every week. It would 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


47 

have been worth going to Germany for just one of 
those days. 

There was the gay, glad party that the Economic 
students gave, out in Handschusheim at the “zum 
Bachlenz”; first, the banquet, with a big roomful of 
jovial young Germans; then the play, in which Carl 
and I both took part. Carl appeared in a mixture 
of his Idaho outfit and a German peasant’s costume, 
beating a large drum. He represented “ Materialin- 

dex,” and called out loudly, “ Ich bitte mich nicht 

% 

zu vergessen. Ich bin auch da.” I was “Methode,” 
which nobody wanted to claim; whereat I wept. I am 
looking at the flashlight picture of us all at this mo¬ 
ment. Then came the dancing, and then at about 
four o’clock the walk home in the moonlight, by the 
old castle ruin in Handschusheim, singing the German 
student-songs. 

There was Carnival season, with its masque balls 
and frivolity, and Faschings Dienstag, when Haupt- 
strasse was given over to merriment all afternoon, 
every one trailing up and down the middle of the 
street masked, and in fantastic costume, throwing 
confetti and tooting horns, Carl and I tooting with 
the rest. 

As time went on, we came to have one little group 
of nine students whom we were with more than any 
others. As each of the men took his degree, he gave a 
party to the rest of us to celebrate it, every one try¬ 
ing to outdo the other in fun. Besides these most im¬ 
portant degree celebrations, there were less dazzling 
affairs, such as birthday parties, dinners, or afternoon 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


48 

coffee in honor of visiting German parents, or merely 
meeting together in our favorite cafe after a Socialist 
lecture or a Max Reger concert. In addition to such 
functions, Carl and I had our Wednesday night spree 
just by ourselves, when every week we met after his 
seminar. Our budget allowed just twelve and a half 
cents an evening for both of us. I put up a supper at 
home, and in good weather we ate down by the river 
or in some park. When it rained and was cold, we sat 
in a corner of the third-class waiting-room by the 
stove, watching the people coming and going in the 
station. Then, for dessert, we went every Wednesday 
to Tante’s Conditorei, where, for two and a half 
cents apiece, we got a large slice of a special brand of 
the most divine cake ever baked. Then, for two and 
a half cents, we saw the movies — at a reduced rate 
because we presented a certain number of street-car 
transfers along with the cash, and then had to sit in 
the first three rows. But you see, we used to remark, 
we have to sit so far away at the opera, it’s good to 
get up close at something! Those were real movies — 
no danger of running into a night-long Robert W. 
Chambers scenario. It was in the days before such 
developments. Then across the street was an “Auto¬ 
mat,” and there, for a cent and a quarter apiece, we 
could hold a glass under a little spigot, press a button, 
and get — refreshments. Then we walked home. 

O Heidelberg — I love your every tree, every stone, 
every blade of grass! 

But at last our year came to an end. We left the 
town in a bower of fruit-blossoms, as we had found it 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


49 


Our dear, most faithful friends, the Kecks, gave us 
a farewell luncheon; and with babies, bundles, and 
baggage, we were off. 

Heidelberg was the only spot I ever wept at leav¬ 
ing. I loved it then, and I love it now, as I love no 
other place on earth and Carl felt the same way. We 
were mournful, indeed, as that train pulled out. 


CHAPTER VII 


The next two weeks were filled with vicissitudes. The 
idea was for Carl to settle the little family in some 
rural bit of Germany, while he did research work in 
the industrial section of Essen, and thereabouts, com¬ 
ing home week-ends. We stopped off first at Bonn. 
Carl spent several days searching up and down the 
Rhine and through the Moselle country for a place 
that would do, which meant a place we could afford 
that was fit and suitable for the babies. There was 
nothing. The report always was: pensions all expen¬ 
sive, and automobiles touring by at a mile a minute 
where the children would be playing. 

On a wild impulse we moved up to Clive, on the 
Dutch border. After Carl went in search of a pension, 
it started to drizzle. The boys, baggage, and I found 
the only nearby place of shelter in a stone-cutter’s in¬ 
closure, filled with new and ornate tombstones. What 
was my impecunious horror, when I heard a small 
crash and discovered that Jim had dislocated a loose 
figure of Christ (unconsciously Cubist in execution) 
from the top of a tombstone! Eight marks charges! 
the cost of sixteen Heidelberg sprees. On his return, 
Carl reported two pensions, one quarantined for 
diphtheria, one for scarlet fever. We slept over a beer- 
hall, with such a racket going on all night as never 
was; and next morning took the first train out — this 
time for Diisseldorf. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


5 1 

It is a trifle momentous, traveling with two babies 
around a country you know nothing about, and can 
find no one to enlighten you. At Dusseldorf Carl 
searched through the town and suburbs for a spot 
to settle us in, getting more and more depressed at 
the thought of leaving us anywhere. That Freiburg 
summer had seared us both deep, and each of us 
dreaded another separation more than either let the 
other know. And then, one night, after another fruit¬ 
less search, Carl came home and informed me that the 
whole scheme was off. Instead of doing his research 
work, we would all go to Munich, and he would take 
an unexpected semester there, working with Brentano. 

What rejoicings, oh, what rejoicings! As Carl re¬ 
marked, it may be that “He travels fastest who trav¬ 
els alone”; but speed was not the only thing he was 
after. So the next day, babies, bundles, baggage, 
and parents went down the Rhine, almost through 
Heidelberg, to Munich, with such joy and content¬ 
ment in our hearts as we could not describe. All those 
days of unhappy searchings Carl had been through 
must have sunk deep, for in his last days of fever 
he would tell me of a form of delirium in which he 
searched again, with a heart of lead, for a place to 
leave the babies and me. 

I remember our first night in Munich. We arrived 
about supper-time, hunted up a cheap hotel as usual, 
near the station, fed the babies, and started to pre¬ 
pare for their retirement. This process in hotels was 
always effected by taking out two bureau-drawers 
and making a bed of each. While we were busy over 


52 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


this, the boys were busy over — just busy. This time 
they both crawled up into a large clothes-press that 
stood in our room, when, crash! bang! — there lay the 
clothes-press, front down, on the floor, boys inside it. 
Such a commotion — hollerings and squallings from 
the internals of the clothes-press, agitated scurryings 
from all directions of the hotel-keeper, his wife, wait¬ 
ers, and chambermaids. All together, we managed to 
stand the clothes-press once more against the wall, 
and to extricate two sobered young ones, the only 
damage being two clothes-press doors banged off their 
hinges. 

Munich is second in my heart to Heidelberg. Carl 

worked hardest of all there, hardly ever going out 

„ * 

nights; but we never got over the feeling that our 
being there together was a sort of gift we had made 
ourselves, and we were ever grateful. And then Carl 
did so remarkably well in the University. A report, 
for instance, which he read before Brentano’s seminar 
was published by the University. Our relations with 
Brentano always stood out as one of the high memo¬ 
ries of Germany. After Carl’s report in Brentano’s 
class, that lovable idol of the German students called 
him to his desk and had a long talk, which ended by 
his asking us both to tea at his house the following 
day. The excitement of our pension over that! We 
were looked upon as the anointed of the Lord. We 
were really a bit overawed, ourselves. We discussed 
neckties, and brushed and cleaned, and smelled con¬ 
siderably of gasoline as we strutted forth, too proud 
to tell, because we were to have tea with Brentano! 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


53 

I can see the street their house was on, their front 
door; I can feel again the little catch in our breaths 
as we rang the bell. Then the charming warmth and 
color of that Italian home, the charming warmth and 
hospitality of that white-haired professor and his 
gracious, kindly wife. There were just ourselves there; 
and what a momentous time it was to the little 
Parkers! Carl was simply radiating joy, and in the 
way he always had when especially pleased, would 
give a sudden beam from ear to ear, and a wink at 
me when no one else was looking. 

Not long after that we were invited for dinner, and 
again for tea, this time, according to orders, bringing 
the sons. They both fell into an Italian fountain in the 
rear garden as soon as we went in for refreshments. 
By my desk now is hanging a photograph we have 
prized as one of our great treasures. Below it is writ¬ 
ten: “Mrs. and Mr. Parker, zur freundlichen Erin- 
nerrung — Lujio Brentano.” Professor Bonn, another 
of Carl’s professors at the University, and his wife, 
were kindness itself to us. Then there was Peter, dear 
old Peter, the Austrian student at our pension, who 
took us everywhere, brought us gifts, and adored the 
babies until he almost spoiled them. 

From Munich we went direct to England. Vicissi¬ 
tudes again in finding a cheap and fit place that would 
do for children to settle in. After ever-hopeful wan¬ 
derings, we finally stumbled upon Swanage in Dorset. 
That was a love of a place on the English Channel, 
where we had two rooms with the Mebers in theii 
funny little brick house, the “Netto.” Simple folk 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


54 

they were: Mr. Meber a retired sailor, the wife rather 
worn with constant roomers, one daughter a dress¬ 
maker, the other working in the “knittin”’ shop. 
Charges, six dollars a week for the family, which in¬ 
cluded cooking and serving our meals — we bought 
the food ourselves. 

Here Carl prepared for his Ph.D. examination, and 
worked on his thesis until it got to the point where he 
needed the British Museum. Then he took a room and 
worked during the week in London, coming down to 
us week-ends. He wrote eager letters, for the time had 
come when he longed to get the preparatory work 
and examination behind him and begin teaching. We 
had an instructorship at the University of California 
waiting for us, and teaching was to begin in January. 
In one letter he wrote: “ I now feel like landing on my 
exam, like a Bulgarian; I am that fierce to lay it out.” 
We felt more than ever, in those days of work piling 
up behind us, that we owned the world; as Carl wrote 
in another letter: “ We’ll stick this out [this being the 
separation of his last trip to London, whence he was 
to start for Heidelberg and his examination, with¬ 
out another visit with us], for, Gott sei dank! the time 
is n’t so fearful, fearful long, it is n’t really, is it? Gee! 
I’m glad I married you. And I want more babies and 
more you, and then the whole gang together for about 
ninety-two years. But life is so fine to us and we are 
getting so much love and big things out of life! ,y 

November i Carl left London for Heidelberg. He 
was to take his examination there December 5, so the 
month of November was a full one for him. He stayed 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


55 

with the dear Kecks, Mother Keck pressing and 
mending his clothes, hovering over him as if he were 
her own son. He wrote once: “To-day we had a small 
leg of venison which I sneaked in last night. Every 
time I note that I burn three quarters of a lampful of 
oil a day among the other things I cost them, it makes 
me feel like buying out a whole Conditorei.” 

I lived for those daily letters telling of his progress. 
Once he wrote: “Just saw Fleiner [Professor in Law] 
and he was fine , but I must get his Volkerrecht cold. 
It is fine reading, and is mighty good and interesting 
every word, and also stuff which a man ought to 
know. This is the last man to see. From now on, it is 
only to study , and I am tickled. I do really like to 
study.” A few days later he wrote: “It is just plain 
sit and absorb these days. Some day I will explain 
how tough it is to learn an entire law subject in five 
days in a strange tongue.” 

And then, on the night of December 5, came the 
telegram of success to “Frau Dr. Parker.” We both 
knew he would pass, but neither of us was prepared 
for the verdict of “ Summa cum laudef the highest 
accomplishment possible. I went up and down the 
main street of little Swanage, announcing the tidings 
right and left. The community all knew that Carl was 
in Germany to take some kind of an examination, 
though it all seemed rather unexplainable. Yet they 
rejoiced with me, — the butcher, the baker, the can¬ 
dlestick-maker, —- without having the least idea what 
they were rejoicing about. Mrs. Meber tore up and 
down Osborne Road to have the fun of telling the 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


56 

immediate neighbors, all of whom were utterly at a 
loss to know what it meant, the truth being that Mrs. 
Meber herself was in that same state. But she had 
somehow caught my excitement, and anything to tell 
was scarce in Swanage. 

So the little family that fared forth from Oakland, 
California, that February 1, for one year at Harvard 
had ended thus — almost four years later a Ph.D. 
summa cum laude from Heidelberg. Not Persia as we 
had planned it nine years before — a deeper, finer life 
than anything we had dreamed. We asked Professor 
Miller, after we got back to California, why in the 
world he had said just “one year in Europe.” 

“ If I had said more, I was afraid it would scare 
you altogether out of ever starting; and I knew if you 
once got over there and were made of the right stuff, 
you’d stay on for a Ph.D.” 

On December 12 Carl was to deliver one of a series 
of lectures in Munich for the Handelshochschule, his 
subject being “Die Einwanderungs und Siedelungs- 
politik in Amerika (Carleton Parker, Privatdocent, 
California-Universitat, St. Francisco).” That very 
day, however, the Prince Regent died, and everything 
was called off. We had our glory — and got our pay. 
Carl was so tired from his examination, that he did 
not object to foregoing the delivery of a German 
address before an audience of four hundred. It was 
read two weeks later by one of the professors. 

On December 15 we had our reunion and celebra¬ 
tion of it all. Carl took the Amerika, second class, at 
Hamburg; the boys and I at Southampton, ushered 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


57 

thither from Swanage and put aboard the steamer 
by our faithful Onkel Keck, son of the folk with whom 
Carl had stayed in Heidelberg, who came all the way 
from London for that purpose. It was not such a 
brash Herr Doktor that we found, after all: the 
Channel had begun to tell on him, as it were, and 
while it was plain that he loved us, it was also plain 
that he did not love the water. So we gave him his 
six days off, and he lay anguish-eyed in a steamer- 
chair while I covered fifty-seven miles a day, tearing 
after two sons who were far more filled with Wander¬ 
lust than they had been three years before. When our 
dad did feel chipper again, he felt very chipper, and 
our last four days were perfect. 

We landed in New York on Christmas Eve, in a 
snowstorm; paid the crushing sum of one dollar and 
seventy-five cents duty, — such a jovial agent as in¬ 
spected our belongings I never beheld; he must al¬ 
ready have had just the Christmas present he most 
wanted, whatever it was. When he heard that we 
had been in Heidelberg, he and several other offi¬ 
cials began a lusty rendering of “Old Heidelberg,” — 
and within an hour we were speeding toward Cali¬ 
fornia, a case of certified milk added to our already 
innumerable articles of luggage. Christmas dinner 
we ate on the train. How those American dining-car 
prices floored us after three years of all we could eat 
for thirty-five cents! 



CHAPTER VIII 


We looked back always on our first semester’s teach¬ 
ing in the University of California as one hectic term. 
We had lived our own lives, found our own joys, for 
four years, and here we were enveloped by old friends, 
by relatives, by new friends, until we knew not which 
way to turn. In addition, Carl was swamped by cam¬ 
pus affairs — by students, many of whom seemed to 
consider him an oasis in a desert of otherwise-to-be- 
deplored, unhuman professors. Every student organi¬ 
zation to which he had belonged as an undergraduate 
opened its arms to welcome him as a faculty member; 
we chaperoned student parties till we heard rag-time 
in our sleep. From January i to May 16, we had four 
nights alone together. You can know we were desper¬ 
ate. Carl used to say: “We may have to make it 
Persia yet.” 

The red-letter event of that term was when, after 
about two months of teaching, President Wheeler 
rang up one evening about seven, — one of the four 
evenings, as it happened, we were at home together, 
— and said: “I thought I should like the pleasure of 
telling you personally, though you will receive official 
notice in the morning, that you have been made an 
assistant professor. We expected you to make good, 
but we did not expect you to make good to such a 
degree quite so soon.” 

Again an occasion for a spree! We tore out hatless 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


59 

across the campus, nearly demolishing the head of 
the College of Commerce as we rounded the Library. 
He must know the excitement. He was pleased. He 
slipped his hand into his pocket saying, “ I must have 
a hand in this celebration.” And with a royal gesture, 
as who should say, “What matter the costs!” slipped 
a dime into Carl’s hand. “Spend it all to-night.” 

Thus we were started on our assistant professor¬ 
ship. But always before and always after, to the stu¬ 
dents Carl was just “Doc.” 

I remember a story he told of how his chief stopped 
him one afternoon at the north gate to the university, 
and said he was discouraged and distressed. Carl was 
getting the reputation of being popular with the 
students, and that would never do. “I don’t wish to 
hear more of such rumors.” Just then the remnants 
of the internals of a Ford, hung together with picture 
wire and painted white, whizzed around the corner. 
Two slouching, hard-working “studes” caught sight 
of Carl, reared up the car, and called,” Hi, Doc, come 
on in!” Then they beheld the Head of the Depart¬ 
ment, hastily pressed some lever, and went hurrying 
on. To the Head it was evidence first-hand. He shook 
his head and went his way. 

Carl was popular with the students, and it is true 
that he was too much so. It was not long before he 
discovered that he was drawing unto himself the all- 
too-lightly-handled “college bum,” and he rebelled. 
Harvard and Germany had given him too high an 
idea of scholarship to have even a traditional univer¬ 
sity patience with the student who, in the University 


6o 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


of California jargon, was “looking for a meal.” He 
was petitioned by twelve students of the College of 
Agriculture to give a course in the Economics of 
Agriculture, and they guaranteed him twenty-five 
students. One hundred and thirty enrolled, and as 
Carl surveyed the assortment below him, he realized 
that a good half of them did not know and did not 
want to know a pear tree from a tractor. He stiffened 
his upper lip, stiffened his examinations, and cinched 
forty of the class. There should be some Latin saying 
that would just fit such a case, but I do not know it. 

It would start, “Exit-,” and the exit would refer 

to the exit of the loafer in large numbers from Carl’s 
courses and the exit from the heart of the loafer of the 
absorbing love he had held for Carl. His troubles were 
largely over. Someone else could care for the maimed, 
the halt, and the blind. 

It was about this time, too, that Carl got into 
difficulties with the intrenched powers on the campus. 
He had what has been referred to as “a passion for 
justice.” Daily the injustice of campus organization 
grew on him; he saw democracy held high as an ideal 
— lip-homage only. Student affairs were run by an 
autocracy which had nothing to justify it except its 
supporters’ claim of “efficiency.” He had little love 
for that word — it is usually bought at too great a 
cost. That year, as usual, he had a small seminar of 
carefully picked students. He got them to open their 
eyes to conditions as they were. When they ceased to 
accept those conditions just because they were, they, 
too, felt the inequality, the farce, of a democratic 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


61 


institution run on such autocratic lines. After seminar 
hours the group would foregather at our house to 
plot as to ways and means. The editor of the campus 
daily saw their point of view — I am not sure now that 
he was not a member of the seminar. 

A slow campaign of education followed. Intrenched 
powers became outraged. Fraternities that had in¬ 
vited Carl almost weekly to lunch, now “could n’t see 
him.” One or two influential alumnae, who had some¬ 
thing to gain from the established order, took up the 
fight. Soon we had a “warning” from one of the Re¬ 
gents that Carl’s efforts on behalf of “democracy” 
were unwelcome. But within a year the entire organ¬ 
ization of campus politics was altered, and now there 
probably is not a student who would not feel out¬ 
raged at the suggestion of a return to the old system. 

Perhaps here is where I can dwell for a moment on 
Carl’s particular brand of democracy. I see so much 
of other kinds. He was what I should call an utterly 
unconscious democrat. He never framed in his own 
mind any theory of “the brotherhood of man” — he 
just lived it, without ever thinking of it as something 
that needed expression in words. I never heard him 
use the term. To him the Individual was everything 
— by that I mean that every relation he had was on 
a personal basis. He could not go into a shop to buy 
a necktie hurriedly, without passing a word with the 
clerk; when he paid his fare on the street car, there 
was a moment’s conversation with the conductor; 
when we had ice-cream of an evening, he asked the 
waitress what was the best thing on in the movies. 



62 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


When we left Oakland for Harvard, the partially 
toothless maid we had sobbed that '‘Mr. Parker had 
been more like a brother to her!” 

One of the phases of his death which struck home 
the hardest was the concern and sorrow the small 
tradespeople showed — the cobbler, the plumber, the 
drug-store clerk. You hear men say: “I often find it 
interesting to talk to working-people and get their 
view-point.” Such an attitude was absolutely foreign 
to Carl. He talked to “working-people” because he 
talked to everybody as he went along his joyous way. 
At a track meet or football game, he was on intimate 
terms with every one within a conversational radius. 
Our wealthy friends would tell us he ruined their 
chauffeurs — they got so that they did n’t know their 
places. As likely as not, he would jolt some constrained 
bank president by engaging him in genial conversa¬ 
tion without an introduction; at a formal dinner he 
would, as a matter of course, have a word or two 
with the butler when he passed the cracked crab, al¬ 
though at times the butlers seemed somewhat pained 
thereby. Some of Carl’s intimate friends were occa¬ 
sionally annoyed — “He talks to everybody.” He no 
more could help talking to everybody than he could 
help — liking pumpkin-pie. He was born that way. 
He had one manner for every human being — Presi¬ 
dent of the University, students, janitors, society 
women, cooks, small boys, judges. He never had any 
material thing to hand out, — not even cigars, for he 
did not smoke himself, — but, as one friend expressed 
it, “he radiated generosity.” 





AN AMERICAN IDYLL 63 

Heidelberg gives one year after passing the exami¬ 
nation to get the doctor’s thesis in final form for pub¬ 
lication. The subject of Carl’s thesis was “The Labor 
Policy of the American Trust.’’ His first summer 
vacation after our return to Berkeley, he went on to 
Wisconsin, chiefly to see Commons, and then to 
Chicago, to study the stockyards at first-hand, and 
the steel industry. He wrote: “Have just seen Com¬ 
mons, who was fine. He said: ‘Send me as soon as 
possible the outline of your thesis and I will pass upon 
it according to my lights.’ . . . He is very interested 
in one of my principal subdivisions, i.e. ‘Technique 
and Unionism,’ or ‘Technique and Labor.’ Believes 
it is a big new consideration.” Again he wrote: “I 
have just finished working through a book on ‘ Immi¬ 
gration’ by Professor Fairchild of Yale, —437 pages 
published three weeks ago, — lent me by Professor 
Ross. It is the very book I have been looking for and 
is superb. I can’t get over how stimulating this looking 
in on a group of University men has been. It in itself 
is worth the trip. I feel sure of my field of work; that 
I am not going off in unfruitful directions; that I am 
keeping up with the wagon. I am now set on finishing 
my book right away — want it out within a year from 
December.” From Chicago he wrote: “Am here with 
the reek of the stockyards in my nose, and just four 
blocks from them. Here lived, in this house, Upton 
Sinclair when he wrote ‘The Jungle.’” And Mary 
McDowell, at the University Settlement where he 
was staying, told a friend of ours since Carl’s death 
about how he came to the table that first night and 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


64 

no one paid much attention to him — just some 
young Westerner nosing about. But by the end of the 
meal he had the whole group leaning elbows on the 
table, listening to everything he had to say; and she 
added, “Every one of us loved him from then on.” 

He wrote, after visiting Swift’s plant, of “seeing 
illustrations for all the lectures on technique I have 
given, and Gee! it felt good. [I could not quote him 
honestly and leave out his “gees”] to actually look 
at things being done the way one has orated about 
’em being done. The thing for me to do here is to see, 
and see the things I’m going to write into my thesis. 
I want to spend a week, if I can, digging into the 
steel industry. With my fine information about the 
ore [he had just acquired that], I am anxious to fill 
out my knowledge of the operation of smelting and 
making steel. Then I can orate industrial dope.” 
Later: “This morning I called on the Vice-President 
of the Illinois Steel Company, on the Treasurer of 
Armour & Co., and lunched with Mr. Crane of Crane 
Co. — Ahem!” 

The time we had when it came to the actual print¬ 
ing of the thesis! It had to be finished by a certain 
day, in order to make a certain steamer, to reach 
Heidelberg when promised. I got in a corner of a 
printing-office and read proof just as fast as it came 
off the press, while Carl worked at home, under you 
can guess what pressure, to complete his manuscript 
— tearing down with new batches for me to get 
in shape for the type-setter, and then racing home to 
do more writing. We finished the thesis about one 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


6 5 

o’clock one morning, proof-reading and all; and the 
next day — or that same day, later — war was de¬ 
clared. Which meant just this — that the University 
of Heidelberg sent word that it would not be safe for 
Carl to send over his thesis, — there were about 
three or four hundred copies to go, according to Ger¬ 
man University regulations, — until the situation had 
quieted down somewhat. The result was that those 
three or four hundred copies lay stacked up in the 
printing-office for three or four years, until at last 
Carl decided it was not a very good thesis anyway, 
and he did n’t want any one to see it, and he would 
write another brand-new one when peace was de¬ 
clared and it could get safely to its destination. So he 
told the printer-man to do away with the whole batch. 
This meant that we were out about a hundred and 
fifty dollars, oh, luckless thought! — a small fortune 
to the young Parkers. So though in a way the thesis 
as it stands was not meant for publication, I shall risk 
quoting from Part One, “The Problem,” so that at 
least his general approach can be gathered. Remem¬ 
ber, the title was “The Labor Policy of the American 
Trust.” 

“When the most astute critic of American labor 
conditions has said, ‘While immigration continues in 
great volume, class lines will be forming and reform¬ 
ing, weak and instable. To prohibit or greatly restrict 
immigration would bring forth class conflict within a 
generation,’ what does it mean? \ 

“ President Woodrow Wilson in a statement of his 
fundamental beliefs has said: ‘Why are we in the 




66 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolu¬ 
tion? . . . Don’t you know that some man with elo¬ 
quent tongue, without conscience, who did not care 
for the nation, could put this whole country into a 
flame? Don’t you know that this country, from one 
end to the other, believes that something is wrong? 
What an opportunity it would be for some man with¬ 
out conscience to spring up and say: “This is the way; 
follow me” — and lead in paths of destruction!’ 
What does it mean? 

“The problem of the social unrest must seek for its 
source in all three classes of society! Two classes are 
employer and employee, the third is the great middle 
class, looking on. What is the relationship between 
the dominating employing figure in American indus¬ 
trial life and the men who work? 

“A nation-wide antagonism to trade-unions, to the 
idea of collective bargaining between men and em¬ 
ployer, cannot spring from a temperamental aversion 
of a mere individual, however powerful, be he Car¬ 
negie, Parry, or Post, or from the common opinion 
in a group such as the so-called Beef Trust, or the 
directorate of the United States Steel Corporation. 
Such a hostility, characterizing as it does one of the 
vitally important relationships in industrial produc¬ 
tion, must seek its reason-to-be in economic causes. 
Profits, market, financing, are placed in certain jeop¬ 
ardy by such a labor policy, and this risk is not con¬ 
tinued, generation after generation, as a casual indul¬ 
gence in temper. Deep below the strong charges 
against the unions of narrow self-interest and un- 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


67 

American limitation of output, dressed by the Citi¬ 
zens’ Alliance in the language of the Declaration of 
Independence, lies a quiet economic reason for the 
hostility. Just as slavery was about to go because it 
did not pay, and America stopped building a mer¬ 
chant marine because it was cheaper to hire England 
to transport American goods, so the American Trust, 
as soon as it had power, abolished the American trade- 
union because it found it costly. What then are these 
economic causes which account for the hostility? 

“What did the union stand in the way of? What 
conditions did the trust desire to establish with which 
the union would interfere? Or did a labor condition 
arise which allowed the employer to wreck the union 
with such ease, that he turned aside for a moment to 
do it, to commit an act desirable only if its perform¬ 
ance cost little danger or money? 

“The answer can be found only after an analysis 
of certain factors in industrial production. These are 
three: — 

“ (a) The control of industrial production. Not only, 
in whose hands has industrial capitalism for the mo¬ 
ment fallen, but in what direction does the evolution 
of control tend? 

“ ( b ) The technique of industrial production. Tech¬ 
nique, at times, instead of being a servant, determines 
by its own characteristics the character of the labor 
and the geographical location of the industry, and 
even destroys the danger of competition, if the 
machinery demanded by it asks for a bigger capital 
investment than a raiding competitor will risk. 


68 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


“(c) The labor market. The labor market can be 
stationary as in England, can diminish as in Ireland, 
or increase as in New England. 

“If the character of these three factors be studied, 
trust hostility to American labor-unions can be ex¬ 
plained in terms of economic measure. One national 
characteristic, however, must be taken for granted. 
That is the commercialized business morality which 
guides American economic life. The responsibility for 
the moral or social effect of an act is so rarely a con¬ 
sideration in a decision, that it can be here neglected 
without error. It is not a factor.” 

At the close of his investigation, he took his first 
vacation in five years — a canoe-trip up the Brule 
with Hal Bradley. That was one of our dreams that 
could never come true — a canoe-trip together. We 
almost bought the canoe at the Exposition — we 
looked holes through the one we wanted. Our trip was 
planned to the remotest detail. We never did come 
into our own in the matter of our vacations, although 
no two people could have more fun in the woods than 
we. But the combination of small children and no 
money and new babies and work — We figured that 
in three more years we could be sure of at least one 
wonderful trip a year. Anyway, we had the joy of our 
plannings. 



CHAPTER IX 


The second term in California had just got well under 
way when Carl was offered the position of Executive 
Secretary in the State Immigration and Housing 
Commission of California. I remember so well the 
night he came home about midnight and told me. 
I am afraid the financial end would have determined 
us, even if the work itself had small appeal — which, 
however, was not the case. The salary offered was 
$4000. We were getting $1500 at the University. We 
were $2000 in debt from our European trip, and saw 
no earthly chance of ever paying it out of our Univer¬ 
sity salary. We figured that we could be square with 
the world in one year on a $4000 salary, and then need 
never be swayed by financial considerations again. 
So Carl accepted the new job. It was the wise thing 
to do anyway, as matters turned out. It threw him 
into direct contact for the first time with the migra¬ 
tory laborer and the I.W.W. It gave him his first bent 
in the direction of labor-psychology, which was to 
become his intellectual passion, and he was fired with 
a zeal that never left him, to see that there should be 
less unhappiness and inequality in the world. 

The concrete result of Carl’s work with the Immi¬ 
gration Commission was the clean-up of labor camps 
all over California. From unsanitary, fly-ridden, dirty 
makeshifts were developed ordered sanitary housing 
accommodations, designed and executed by experts 


7° 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


in their fields. Also he awakened, through countless 
talks up and down the State, some understanding of 
the I.W.W. and his problem; although, judging from 
the newspapers nowadays, his work would seem to 
have been almost forgotten. As the phrase went, 
“Carleton Parker put the migratory on the map.” 

I think of the Wheatland Hop-Fields riot, or the 
Ford and Suhr case, which Carl was appointed to 
investigate for the Federal government, as the dra¬ 
matic incident which focused his attention on the 
need of a deeper approach to a sound understanding 
of labor and its problems, and which, in turn, justi¬ 
fied Mr. Bruere in stating in the “New Republic”: 
“Parker was the first of our Economists, not only to 
analyse the psychology of labor and especially of cas¬ 
ual labor, but also to make his analysis the basis for 
an applied technique of industrial and social recon¬ 
struction.” Also, that was the occasion of his concrete 
introduction to the I.W.W. He wrote an account of 
it, later, for the “Survey,” and an article on “The 
California Casual and His Revolt” for the “Quarterly 
Journal of Economics,” in November, 1915. 

It is all interesting enough, I feel, to warrant going 
into some detail. 

The setting of the riot is best given in the article 
above referred to, “The California Casual and His 
Revolt.” 

“The story of the Wheatland hop-pickers' riot is 
as simple as the facts of it are new and naive in strike 
histories. Twenty-eight hundred pickers were camped 
on a treeless hill which was part of the-ranch, 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


7 1 


the largest single employer of agricultural labor in the 
state. Some were in tents, some in topless squares of 
sacking, or with piles of straw. There was no organi¬ 
zation for sanitation, no garbage-disposal. The tem¬ 
perature during the week of the riot had remained 
near 105°, and though the wells were a mile from 
where the men, women, and children were picking, 
and their bags could not be left for fear of theft of the 
hops, no water was sent into the fields. A lemonade 
wagon appeared at the end of the week, later found 
to be a concession granted to a cousin of the ranch 
owner. Local Wheatland stores were forbidden to send 
delivery wagons to the camp grounds. It developed 
in the state investigation that the owner of the ranch 
received half of the net profits earned by an alleged 
independent grocery store, which had been granted 
the ‘grocery concession’ and was located in the 
centre of the camp ground. . . . 

“The pickers began coming to Wheatland on Tues¬ 
day, and by Sunday the irritation over the wage- 
scale, the absence of water in the fields, plus the per¬ 
sistent heat and the increasing indignity of the camp, 
had resulted in mass meetings, violent talk, and a 
general strike. 

“The ranch owner, a nervous man, was harassed 
by the rush of work brought on by the too rapidly 
ripening hops, and indignant at the jeers and catcalls 
which greeted his appearance near the meetings of 
the pickers. Confused with a crisis outside his slender 
social philosophy, he acted true to his tradition, and 
perhaps his type, and called on a sheriff’s posse. What 


7 2 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


industrial relationship had existed was too insecure 
to stand such a procedure. It disappeared entirely, 
leaving in control the instincts and vagaries of a mob 
on the one hand, and great apprehension and inexperi¬ 
ence on the other. 

“As if a stage had been set, the posse arrived in 
automobiles at the instant when the officially ‘ wanted’ 
strike-leader was addressing a mass meeting of ex¬ 
cited men, women, and children. After a short and 
typical period of skirmishing and the minor and major 
events of arresting a person under such circumstances, 
a member of the posse standing outside fired a double- 
barreled shot-gun over the heads of the crowd, ‘ to 
sober them,’ as he explained it. Four men were killed 
*— two of the posse and two strikers; the posse fled 
in their automobiles to the county seat, and all that 
night the roads out of Wheatland were filled with 
pickers leaving the camp. Eight months later, two 
hop-pickers, proved to be the leaders of the strike and 
its agitation, were convicted of murder in the first 
degree and sentenced to life imprisonment. Their 
appeal for a new trial was denied.” 

In his report to the Governor, written in 1914, Carl 
characterized the case as follows: — 

“The occurrence known as the Wheatland Hop- 
Fields riot took place on Sunday afternoon, August 
3, 1913. Growing discontent among the hop-pickers 
over wages, neglected camp-sanitation and absence 
of water in the fields had resulted in spasmodic meet¬ 
ings of protest on Saturday and Sunday morning, and 
finally by Sunday noon in a more or less involuntary 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


73 


strike. At five o’clock on Sunday about one thousand 
pickers gathered about a dance pavilion to listen to 
speakers. Two automobiles carrying a sheriff’s posse 
drove up to this meeting, and officials armed with 
guns and revolvers attempted to disperse the crowd 
and to arrest, on a John Doe warrant, Richard Ford, 
the apparent leader of the strike. In the ensuing 
confusion shooting began and some twenty shots were 
fired. Two pickers, a deputy sheriff, and the district 
attorney of the county were killed. The posse fled 
and the camp remained unpoliced until the State 
Militia arrived at dawn next morning. 

“The occurrence has grown from a casual, though 
bloody, event in California labor history into such a 
focus for discussion and analysis of the State’s great 
migratory labor-problem that the incident can well 
be said to begin, for the commonwealth, a new and 
momentous labor epoch. 

“The problem of vagrancy; that of the unemployed 
and the unemployable; the vexing conflict between 
the right of agitation and free speech and the law 
relating to criminal conspiracy; the housing and wages 
of agricultural laborers; the efficiency and sense of 
responsibility found in a posse of country deputies; 
the temper of the country people faced with the con¬ 
fusion and rioting of a labor outbreak; all these 
problems have found a starting point for their new 
and vigorous analysis in the Wheatland riot. 

In the same report, submitted a year before the 
“Quarterly Journal ” article, and almost a year before 
his study of psychology began, Carl wrote: — 


74 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


“The manager and part-owner of the ranch is an 
example of a certain type of California employer. The 
refusal of this type to meet the social responsibilities 
which come with the hiring of human beings for labor, 
not only works concrete and cruelly unnecessary mis¬ 
ery upon a class little able to combat personal indig¬ 
nity and degradation, but adds fuel to the fire of 
resentment and unrest which is beginning to burn in 
the uncared-for migratory worker in California. That 

-could refuse his clear duty of real trusteeship of 

a camp on his own ranch, which contained hundreds 
of women and children, is a social fact of miserable 
import. The excuses we have heard of unprepared¬ 
ness, of alleged ignorance of conditions, are shamed 
by the proven human suffering and humiliation re¬ 
peated each day of the week, from Wednesday to 
Sunday. Even where the employer’s innate sense of 
moral obligation fails to point out his duty, he should 
have realized the insanity of stimulating unrest and 
bitterness in this inflammable labor force. The riot 

on the-ranch is a California contribution to the 

literature of the social unrest in America.” 

As to the “Legal and Economic Aspects” of the 
case, again quoting from the report to the Governor: — 

“The position taken by the defense and their sym¬ 
pathizers in the course of the trial has not only an 
economic and social bearing, but many arguments 
made before the court are distinct efforts to introduce 
sociological modifications of the law which will have 
a far-reaching effect on the industrial relations of 
capital and labor. It is asserted that the common law, 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


75 

on which American jurisprudence is founded, is known 
as an ever-developing law, which must adapt itself 
to changing economic and social conditions; and, in 
this connection, it is claimed that the established the¬ 
ories of legal causation must be enlarged to include 
economic and social factors in the chain of causes 
leading to a result. Concretely, it is argued: — 

11 First, That, when unsanitary conditions lead to 
discontent so intense that the crowd can be incited 
to bloodshed, those responsible for the unsanitary 
conditions are to be held legally responsible for the 
bloodshed, as well as the actual inciters of the riot. 

11 Second, That, if the law will not reach out so far 
as to hold the creator of unsanitary, unlivable condi¬ 
tions guilty of bloodshed, at any rate such conditions 
excuse the inciters from liability, because inciters are 
the involuntary transmitting agents of an uncon¬ 
trollable force set in motion by those who created the 
unlivable conditions. . . . 

“ Furthermore, on the legal side, modifications of 
the law of property are urged. It is argued that mod¬ 
ern law no longer holds the rights of private property 
sacred, that these rights are being constantly regu¬ 
lated and limited, and that in the Wheatland case the 
owner’s traditional rights in relation to his own lands 
are to be held subject to the right of the laborers to 
organize thereon. It is urged that a worker on land 
has a ‘property right in his job,’ and that he cannot 
be made to leave the job, or the land, merely because 
he is trying to organize his fellow workers to make 
a protest as to living and economic conditions. It is 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


76 

urged that the organizing worker cannot be made to 
leave the job because the job is his property and it is 
all that he has.” 

As to “The Remedy”: — 

“It is obvious that the violent strike methods 
adopted by the I.W.W. type agitators, which only 
incidentally, although effectively, tend to improve 
camp conditions, are not to be accepted as a solution 
of the problem. It is also obvious that the conviction 
of the agitators, such as Ford and Suhr, of murder, 
is not a solution, but is only the punishment or re¬ 
venge inflicted by organized society for a past deed. 
The Remedy lies in prevention. 

“It is the opinion of your investigator that the 
improvement of living conditions in the labor camps 
will have the immediate effect of making the recur¬ 
rence of impassioned, violent strikes and riots not 
only improbable, but impossible; and furthermore, 
such improvement will go far towards eradicating the 
hatred and bitterness in the minds of the employers 
and in the minds of the roving, migratory laborers. 
This accomplished, the two conflicting parties will be 
in a position to meet on a saner, more constructive 
basis, in solving the further industrial problems aris¬ 
ing between them. . . . 

“They must come to realize that their own laxity 
in allowing the existence of unsanitary and filthy con¬ 
ditions gives a much-desired foothold to the very 
agitators of the revolutionary I.W.W. doctrines whom 
they so dread; they must learn that unbearable, 
aggravating living conditions inoculate the minds of 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


77 

the otherwise peaceful workers with the germs of 
bitterness and violence, as so well exemplified at the 
Wheatland riot, giving the agitators a fruitful field 
wherein to sow the seeds of revolt and preach the 
doctrine of direct action and sabotage. 

“On the other hand, the migratory laborers must 
be shown that revolts accompanied by force in scat¬ 
tered and isolated localities not only involve serious 
breaches of law and lead to crime, but that they 
accomplish no lasting constructive results in advanc¬ 
ing their cause. 

“The Commission intends to furnish a clearing¬ 
house to hear complaints of grievances, of both sides, 
and act as a mediator or safety-valve/’ 

In the report to the Governor appear Carl’s first 
writings on the I.W.W. 

“Of this entire labor force at the - ranch, it 

appears that some ioo had been I.W.W. ‘card men,’ 
or had had affiliations with that organization. There 
is evidence that there was in this camp a loosely 
caught together camp local of the I.W.W., with about 
30 active members. It is suggestive that these 30 men, 
through a spasmodic action, and with the aid of the 
deplorable camp conditions, dominated a heterogene¬ 
ous mass of 2800 unskilled laborers in 3 days. Some 
700 or 800 of the force were of the ‘hobo’ class, in 
every sense potential I.W.W. strikers. At least 40° 
knew in a rough way the — for them curiously attrac¬ 
tive — philosophy of the I.W.W., and could also sing 
some of its songs. 

“Of the ioo-odd ‘card men’ of the I.W.W., some 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


78 

had been through the San Diego affair, some had been 
soap-boxers in Fresno, a dozen had been in the Free 
Speech fight in Spokane. They sized up the hop-field 
as a ripe opportunity, as the principal defendant, 
‘Blackie’ Ford, puts it, ‘to start something.’ On 
Friday, two days after picking began, the practical 
agitators began working through the camp. Whether 

or not Ford came to the-ranch to foment trouble 

seems immaterial. There are five Fords in every 
camp of seasonal laborers in California. We have 
devoted ourselves in these weeks to such questions 
as this: ‘How big a per cent of California’s migratory 
seasonal labor force know the technique of an I.W.W. 
strike?’ ‘How many of the migratory laborers know 
when conditions are ripe to “start something”?’ We 
are convinced that among the individuals of every 
fruit-farm labor group are many potential strikers. 
Where a group of hoboes sit around a fire under a 
railroad bridge, many of the group can sing I.W.W. 
songs without the book. This was not so three years 
ago. The I.W.W. in California is not a closely organ¬ 
ized body, with a steady membership. The rank and 
file know little of the technical organization of indus¬ 
trial life which their written constitution demands. 
They listen eagerly to the appeal for the ‘solidarity’ 
of their class. In the dignifying of vagabondage 
through their crude but virile song and verse, in the 
bitter vilification of the jail turnkey and county 
sheriff, in their condemnation of the church and its 
formal social work, they find the vindication of their 
hobo status which they desire. They cannot sustain 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


79 

a live organization unless they have a strike or free- 
speech fight to stimulate their spirit. It is in their 
methods of warfare, not in their abstract philosophy 
or even hatred of law and judges, that danger lies for 
organized society. Since every one of the 5000 labor¬ 
ers in California who have been at some time con¬ 
nected with the I.W.W. considers himself a ‘camp 
delegate’ with walking papers to organize a camp 
local, this small army is watching, as Ford did, for an 
unsanitary camp or low wage-scale, to start the strike 
which will not only create a new I.W.W. local, but 
bring fame to the organizer. This common acceptance 
of direct action and sabotage as the rule of operation, 
the songs and the common vocabulary are, we feel 
convinced, the first stirring of a class expression. 

“Class solidarity they have not. That may never 
come, for the migratory laborer has neither the force 
nor the vision nor tenacity to hold long enough to the 
ideal to attain it. But the I.W.W. is teaching a method 
of action which will give this class in violent flare-ups, 
such as that at Wheatland, expression. 

“The dying away of the organization after the out¬ 
burst is, therefore, to be expected. Their social con¬ 
dition is a miserable one. Their work, even at the 
best, must be irregular. They have nothing to lose in 
a strike, and, as a leader put it, ‘ A riot and a chance 
to blackguard a jailer is about the only intellectual 
fun we have.’ 

“Taking into consideration the misery and physical 
privation and the barren outlook of this life of the 
seasonal worker, the I.W.W. movement, with all its 


8 o 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


irresponsible motive and unlawful action, becomes in 
reality a class-protest, and the dignity which this 
characteristic gives it perhaps alone explains the 
persistence of the organization in the field. 

“ Those attending the protest mass-meeting of the 
Wheatland hop-pickers were singing the I.W.W. song 
‘Mr. Block,’ when the sheriff’s posse came up in its 
automobiles. The crowd had been harangued by an 
experienced I.W.W. orator—‘Blackie’ Ford. They 
had been told, according to evidence, to ‘knock the 
blocks off the scissor-bills.’ Ford had taken a sick 
baby from its mother’s arms and, holding it before 
the eyes of the 1500 people, had cried out: ‘It’s for 
the life of the kids we’re doing this.’ Not a quarter 
of the crowd was of a type normally venturesome 
enough to strike, and yet, when the sheriff went after 
Ford, he was knocked down and kicked senseless by 
infuriated men. In the bloody riot which then ensued, 
District Attorney Manwell, Deputy Sheriff Riordan, 
a negro Porto Rican and the English boy were shot 
and killed. Many were wounded. The posse literally 
fled, and the camp remained practically unpoliced 
until the State Militia arrived at dawn the next day. 

“The question of social responsibility is one of the 
deepest significance. The posse was, I am convinced, 
over-nervous and, unfortunately, over-rigorous. This 
can be explained in part by the state-wide apprehen¬ 
sion over the I.W.W.; in part by the normal Cali¬ 
fornia country posse’s attitude toward a labor trouble. 
A deputy sheriff, at the most critical moment, fired 
a shot in the air, as he stated, ‘to sober the crowd.’ 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


81 


There were armed men in the crowd, for every crowd 
of 2000 casual laborers includes a score of gunmen. 
Evidence goes to show that even the gentler moun- 
tainfolk in the crowd had been aroused to a sense of 

personal injury.-’s automobile had brought part 

of the posse. Numberless pickers cling to the belief 

that the posse was ‘-’s police.' When Deputy 

Sheriff Dakin shot into the air, a fusillade took place; 
and when he had fired his last shell, an infuriated 
crowd of men and women chased him to the ranch 
store, where he was forced to barricade himself. The 
crowd was dangerous and struck the first blow. The 
murderous temper which turned the crowd into a mob 
is incompatible with social existence, let alone social 
progress. The crowd at the moment of the shooting 
was a wild and lawless animal. But to your investi¬ 
gator the important subject to analyze is not the guilt 
or innocence of Ford or Suhr, as the direct stimulators 
of the mob in action, but to name and standardize the 
early and equally important contributors to a psycho¬ 
logical situation which resulted in an unlawful killing. 
If this is done, how can we omit either the filth of the 
hop-ranch, the cheap gun-talk of the ordinary deputy 
sheriff, or the unbridled, irresponsible speech of the 
soap-box orator? 

“Without doubt the propaganda which the I.W.W. 
had actually adopted for the California seasonal 
worker can be, in its fairly normal working out in law, 
a criminal conspiracy, and under that charge, Ford 
and Suhr have been found guilty of the Wheatland 
murder. But the important fact is, that this propa- 




82 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


ganda will be carried out, whether unlawful or not. 
We have talked hours with the I.W.W. leaders, and 
they are absolutely conscious of their position in the 
eyes of the law. Their only comment is that they are 
glad, if it must be a conspiracy, that it is a criminal 
conspiracy. They have volunteered the beginning of 
a cure; it is to clean up the housing and wage problem 
of the seasonal worker. The shrewdest I.W.W. leader 
we found said: ‘We can’t agitate in the country un¬ 
less things are rotten enough to bring the crowd along. ’ 
They evidently were in Wheatland.” 

He was high ace with the Wobbly for a while. They 
invited him to their Jungles, they carved him pres¬ 
ents in jail. I remember a talk he gave on some phase 
of the California labor-problem one Sunday night, at 
the Congregational church in Oakland. The last three 
rows were filled with unshaven hoboes, who filed up 
afterwards, to the evident distress of the clean regular 
church-goers, to clasp his hand. They withdrew their 
allegiance after a time, which naturally in no way 
phased Carl’s scientific interest in them. A paper hos¬ 
tile to Carl’s attitude on the I.W.W. and his insistence 
on the clean-up of camps published an article por¬ 
traying him as a double-faced individual who feigned 
an interest in the under-dog really to undo him, as he 
was at heart and pocket-book a capitalist, being the 
possessor of an independent income of $150,000 a 
year. Some I.W.W.’s took this up, and convinced a 
large meeting that he was really trying to sell them 
out. It is not only the rich who are fickle. Some of 
them remained his firm friends always, however. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


83 

That summer two of his students hoboed it till they 
came down with malaria, in the meantime turning in 
a fund of invaluable facts regarding the migratory 
and his life. 

A year later, in his article in the “ Quarterly 
Journal,” and, be it remembered, after his study of 
psychology had begun, Carl wrote: — 

“There is here, beyond a doubt, a great laboring 
population experiencing a high suppression of normal 
instincts and traditions. There can be no greater per¬ 
version of a desirable existence than this insecure, 
under-nourished, wandering life, with its sordid sex- 
expression and reckless and rare pleasures. Such a life 
leads to one of two consequences: either a sinking of 
the class to a low and hopeless level, where they be¬ 
come, through irresponsible conduct and economic 
inefficiency, a charge upon society; or revolt and 
guerrilla labor warfare. 

“The migratory laborers, as a class, are the fin¬ 
ished product of an environment which seems cruelly 
efficient in turning out beings moulded after all the 
standards society abhors. Fortunately the psycholo¬ 
gists have made it unnecessary to explain that there 
is nothing willful or personally reprehensible in the 
vagrancy of these vagrants. Their histories show that, 
starting with the long hours and dreary winters of the 
farms they ran away from, through their character- 
debasing experience with irregular industrial labor, 
on to the vicious economic life of the winter unem¬ 
ployed, their training predetermined but one out¬ 
come. Nurture has triumphed over nature; the envi- 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


84 

ronment has produced its type. Difficult though the 
organization of these people may be, a coincidence of 
favoring conditions may place an opportunity in the 
hands of a super-leader. If this comes, one can be 
sure that California will be both very astonished and 
very misused.” 

I was told only recently of a Belgian economics 
professor, out here in California during the war, on 
official business connected with aviation. He asked at 
once to see Carl, but was told we had moved to 
Seattle. “My colleagues in Belgium asked me to be 
sure and see Professor Parker,” he said, “as we con¬ 
sider him the one man in America who understands 
the problem of the migratory laborer.” 

That winter Carl got the city of San Jose to stand 
behind a model unemployed lodging-house, one of 
the two students who had “hoboed” during the sum¬ 
mer taking charge of it. The unemployed problem, 
as he ran into it at every turn, stirred Carl to his 
depths. At one time he felt it so strongly that he 
wanted to start a lodging-house in Berkeley, himself, 
just to be helping out somehow, even though it would 
be only surface help. 

It was also about this time that California was 
treated to the spectacle of an Unemployed Army, 
which was driven from pillar to post, — or, in this 
case, from town to town, — each trying to outdo the 
last in protestations of unhospitality. Finally, in 
Sacramento the fire-hoses were turned on the army. 
At that Carl flamed with indignation, and expressed 
himself in no mincing terms, both to the public and 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


§5 

to the reporter who sought his views. He was no hand 
to keep clippings, but I did come across one of his 
milder interviews in the San Francisco “Bulletin” 
of March n, 1914. 

“That California’s method of handling the unem¬ 
ployed problem is in accord with the ‘careless, cruel 
and unscientific attitude of society on the labor ques¬ 
tion,’ is the statement made to-day by Professor 
Carleton H. Parker, Assistant Professor of Industrial 
economy, and secretary of the State Immigration 
Committee. 

“‘There are two ways of looking at this winter’s 
unemployed problem,’ said Dr. Parker; ‘one is fatally 
bad and the other promises good. One way is shallow 
and biased; the other strives to use the simple rules 
of science for the analysis of any problem. One way 
is to damn the army of the unemployed and the irre¬ 
sponsible, irritating vagrants who will not work. The 
other way is to admit that any such social phenome¬ 
non as this army is just as normal a product of our 
social organization as our own university. 

“ ‘Much street-car and ferry analysis of this problem 
that I have overheard seems to believe that this army 
created its own degraded self, that a vagrant is a 
vagrant from personal desire and perversion. This 
analysis is as shallow as it is untrue. If unemployment 
and vagrancy are the product of our careless, indiffer¬ 
ent society over the half-century, then its cure will 
come only by a half-century’s careful regretful social 
labor by this same tardy society. 

“ ‘The riot at Sacramento is merely the appearance 


86 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


of the problem from the back streets into the strong 
light. The handling of the problem there is unhappily 
in accord with the careless, cruel attitude of society on 
this question. We are willing to respect the anxiety 
of Sacramento, threatened in the night with this irre¬ 
sponsible, reckless invasion; but how can the city 
demand of vagrants observance of the law, when they 
drop into mob-assertion the minute the problem comes 
up to them?’ ” 

The illustration he always used to express his opin¬ 
ion of the average solution of unemployment, I quote 
from a paper of his on that subject, written in the 
spring of 1915. 

“There is an old test for insanity which is made as 
follows: the suspect is given a cup, and is told to 
empty a bucket into which water is running from a 
faucet. If the suspect turns off the water before he 
begins to bail out the bucket, he is sane. Nearly all 
the current solutions of unemployment leave the 
faucet running. . . . 

“The heart of the problem, the cause, one might 
well say, of unemployment, is that the employment 
of men regularly or irregularly is at no time an 
important consideration of those minds which con¬ 
trol industry. Social organization has ordered it that 
these minds shall be interested only in achieving a 
reasonable profit in the manufacture and the sale of 
goods. Society has never demanded that industries 
be run even in part to give men employment. Rewards 
are not held out for such a policy, and therefore it is 
unreasonable to expect such a performance. Though 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 87 

a favorite popular belief is that we must ‘work to 
live,’ we have no current adage of a ‘right to work.’ 
This winter there are shoeless men and women, 
closed shoe-factories, and destitute shoemakers; chil¬ 
dren in New England with no woolen clothing, half¬ 
time woolen mills, and unemployed spinners and 
weavers. Why? Simply because the mills cannot turn 
out the reasonable business profit; and since that is 
the only promise that can galvanize them into activ¬ 
ity, they stand idle, no matter how much humanity 
finds of misery and death in this decision. This state¬ 
ment is not a peroration to a declaration for Socialism. 
It seems a fair rendering of the matter-of-fact logic 
of the analysis. 

“It seems hopeless, and also unfair, to expect out- 
of-work insurance, employment bureaus, or philan¬ 
thropy, to counteract the controlling force of profit- 
seeking. There is every reason to believe that profit- 
seeking has been a tremendous stimulus to economic 
activity in the past. It is doubtful if the present great 
accumulation of capital would have come into exist¬ 
ence without it. But to-day it seems as it were to be 
caught up by its own social consequences. It is hard 
to escape from the insistence of a situation in which 
the money a workman makes in a year fails to cover 
the upkeep of his family; and this impairment of the 
father’s income through unemployment has largely 
to be met by child- and woman-labor. The Federal 
Immigration Commission’s report shows that in not 
a single great American industry can the average 
yearly income of the father keep his family. Seven 


88 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


hundred and fifty dollars is the bare minimum for the 
maintenance of the average-sized American industrial 
family. The average yearly earnings of the heads of 
families working in the United States in the iron and 
steel industry is $409; in bituminous coal-mining 
$451; in the woolen industry $400; in silk $448; in 
cotton $470; in clothing $530; in boots and shoes 
$573; in leather $511; in sugar-refining $549; in the 
meat industry $578; in furniture $598, etc. 

“He who decries created work, municipal lodging- 
houses, bread-lines, or even sentimental charity, in the 
face of the winter’s destitution, has an unsocial soul. 
The most despicable thing to-day is the whine of our 
cities lest their inadequate catering to their own home¬ 
less draw a few vagrants from afar. But when the 
agony of our winter makeshifting is by, will a suffi¬ 
cient minority of our citizens rise and demand that the 
best technical, economic, and sociological brains in 
our wealthy nation devote themselves with all cour¬ 
age and honesty to the problem of unemployment?” 

Carl was no diplomat, in any sense of the word — 
above all, no political diplomat. It is a wonder that 
the Immigration and Housing Commission stood be¬ 
hind him as long as it did. He grew rabid at every 
political appointment which, in his eyes, hampered 
his work. It was evident, so they felt, that he was not 
tactful in his relations with various members of the 
Commission. It all galled him terribly, and after much 
consultation at home, he handed in his resignation. 
During the first term of his secretaryship, from Octo¬ 
ber to December, he carried his full-time University 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


89 

work. From January to May he had a seminar only, 
as I remember. From August on he gave no Univer¬ 
sity work at all; so, after asking to have his resignation 
from the Commission take effect at once, he had at 
once to find something to do to support his family. 

This was in October, 1914, after just one year as 
Executive Secretary. We were over in Contra Costa 
County then, on a little ranch of my father’s. Berkeley 
socially had come to be too much of a strain, and, 
too, we wanted the blessed sons to have a real country 
experience. Ten months we were there. Three days 
after Carl resigned, he was on his way to Phoenix, 
Arizona, — where there was a threatened union tie-up, 

— as United States Government investigator of the 
labor situation. He added thereby to his first-hand 
stock of labor-knowledge, made a firm friend of 
Governor Hunt, — he was especially interested in his 
prison policy, — and in those few weeks was the 
richer by one more of the really intimate friendships 
one counts on to the last — Will Scarlett. 

He wrote, on Carl’s death, “What a horrible, hid¬ 
eous loss! Any of us could so easily have been spared; 
that he, who was of such value, had to go seems such 
an utter waste. ... He was one of that very, very 
small circle of men, whom, in the course of our lives, 
we come really to love. His friendship meant so much 

— though I heard but infrequently from him, there 
was the satisfaction of a deep friendship that was al¬ 
ways there and always the same. He would have gone 
so far! I have looked forward to a great career for 
him, and had such pride in him. It’s too hideous!’’ 



CHAPTER X 


In January, 1915, Carl took up his teaching again in 
real earnest, commuting to Alamo every night. I 
would have the boys in bed and the little supper all 
ready by the fire; then I would prowl down the road 
with my electric torch, to meet him coming home; he 
would signal in the distance with his torch, and I with 
mine. Then the walk back together, sometimes ankle- 
deep in mud; then supper, making the toast over the 
coals, and an evening absolutely to ourselves. And 
never in all our lives did we ask for more joy than 
that. 

That spring we began building our very own home 
in Berkeley. The months in Alamo had made us feel 
that we could never bear to be in the centre of things 
again, nor, for that matter, could we afford a lot in 
the centre of things; so we bought high up on the 
Berkeley hills, where we could realize as much privacy 
as was possible, and yet where our friends could reach 
us — if they could stand the climb. The love of a nest 
we built! We were longer in that house than anywhere 
else: two years almost to the day — two years of such 
happiness as no other home has ever seen. There, 
around the redwood table in the living-room, by the 
window overlooking the Golden Gate, we had the 
suppers that meant much joy to us and I hope to the 
friends we gathered around us. There, on the porches 
overhanging the very Canyon itself we had our Sun- 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


9 * 


day tea-parties. (Each time Carl would plead, “ I don’t 
have to wear a stiff collar, do I?” and he knew that I 
would answer, “You wear anything you want, ” which 
usually meant a blue soft shirt.) 

We had a little swimming-tank in back, for the 
boys. 

And then, most wonderful of all, came the day 
when the June-Bug was born, the daughter who was 
to be the very light of her adoring father’s eyes. (Her 
real name is Alice Lee.) “Mother, there never really 
was such a baby, was there?” he would ask ten times 
a day. She was not born up on the hill; but in ten days 
we were back from the hospital and out day and night 
through that glorious July, on some one of the porches 
overlooking the bay and the hills. And we added our 
adored Nurse Balch as a friend of the family forever. 

I always think of Nurse Balch as the person who 
more than any other, perhaps, understood to some 
degree just what happiness filled our lives day in and 
day out. No one assumes anything before a trained 
nurse — they are around too constantly for that. 
They see the misery in homes, they see what joy 
there is. And Nurse Balch saw, because she was 
around practically all the time for six weeks, that 
there was nothing but joy every minute of the day 
in our home. I do not know how I can make people 
understand, who are used to just ordinary happiness, 
what sort of a life Carl and I led. It was not just that 
we got along. It was an active, not a passive state. 
There was never a home-coming, say at lunch-time, 
that did not seem an event —• when our curve of hap- 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


9 2 

piness abruptly rose. Meals were joyous occasions 
always; perhaps too scant attention paid to the man¬ 
ners of the young, but much gurglings, and “Tell 
some more, daddy,” and always detailed accounts of 
every little happening during the last few hours of 
separation. 

Then there was ever the difficulty of good-byes, 
though it meant only for a few hours, until supper. 
And at supper-time he would come up the front stairs, 
I waiting for him at the top, perhaps limping. That 
was his little joke — we had many little family jokes. 
Limping meant that I was to look in every pocket 
until I unearthed a bag of peanut candy. Usually he 
was laden with bundles — provisions, shoes from the 
cobbler, a tennis-racket restrung, and an armful of 
books. After greetings, always the question, “How’s 
my June-Bug?” and a family procession upstairs to 
peer over a crib at a fat gurgler. And “Mother, there 
never really was such a baby, was there?” No, nor 
such a father. 

It was that first summer back in Berkeley, the year 
before the June-Bug was born, when Carl was teach¬ 
ing in Summer School, that we had our definite 
enthusiasm over labor-psychology aroused. Will 
Ogburn, who was also teaching at Summer School that 
year, and whose lectures I attended, introduced us to 
Hart’s “Psychology of Insanity,” several books by 
Freud, McDougall’s “Social Psychology,” etc. I re¬ 
member Carl’s seminar the following spring — his 
last seminar at the University of California. He had 
started with nine seminar students three years be- 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


93 

fore; now there were thirty-three. They were all such 
a superior picked lot, some seniors, mostly graduates, 
that he felt there was no one he could ask to stay 
out. I visited it all the term, and I am sure that no¬ 
where else on the campus could quite such heated 
and excited discussions have been heard — Carl sim¬ 
ply sitting at the head of the table, directing here, 
leading there. 

The general subject was Labor-Problems. The stu¬ 
dents had to read one book a week — such books as 
Hart’s “Psychology of Insanity,” Keller’s “Societal 
Evolution,” Holt’s “Freudian Wish,” McDougall’s 
“Social Psychology,” — two weeks to that, — Lipp- 
mann’s “Preface to Politics,” Veblen’s “Instinct of 
Workmanship,” Wallas’s “Great Society,” Thorn¬ 
dike’s “Educational Psychology,” Hoxie’s “Scientific 
Management,” Ware’s “The Worker and his Coun¬ 
try,” G. H. Parker’s “Biology and Social Problems,” 
and so forth — and ending, as a concession to the 
idealists, with Royce’s “Philosophy of Loyalty.” 

One of the graduate students of the seminar wrote 
me: “For three years I sat in his seminar on Labor- 
Problems, and had we both been there ten years longer, 
each season would have found me in his class. His 
influence on my intellectual life was by far the most 
stimulating and helpful of all the men I have known. 

. . . But his spirit and influence will live on in the 
lives of those who sat at his feet and learned.” 

The seminar was too large, really, for intimate dis¬ 
cussion, so after a few weeks several of the boys asked 
Carl if they could have a little sub-seminar. It was a 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


94 

very rushed time for him, but he said that, if they 
would arrange all the details, he would save them 
Tuesday evenings. So every Tuesday night about a 
dozen boys climbed our hill to rediscuss the subject of 
the seminar of that afternoon — and everything else 
under the heavens and beyond. I laid out ham sand¬ 
wiches, or sausages, or some edible dear to the male 
heart, and coffee to be warmed, and about midnight 
could be heard the sounds of banqueting from the 
kitchen. Three students told me on graduation that 
those Tuesday nights at our house had meant more 
intellectual stimulus than anything that ever came 
into their lives. 

One of these boys wrote to me after Carl’s death: — 

“When I heard that Doc had gone, one of the finest 
and cleanest men I have ever had the privilege of 
associating with, I seemed to have stopped thinking. 
It did n’t seem possible to me, and I can remember 
very clearly of thinking what a rotten world this is 
when we have to live and lose a man like Doc. I have 
talked to two men who were associated with him in 
somewhat the same manner as I was, and we simply 
looked at one another after the first sentences, and 
then I guess the thoughts of a man who had made so 
much of an impression on our minds drove coherent 
speech away. ... I have had the opportunity since 
leaving college of experiencing something real besides 
college life and I can’t remember during all that 
period of not having wondered how Dr. Parker would 
handle this or that situation. He was simply immense 
to me at all times, and if love of a man-to-man kind 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


95 

does exist, then I truthfully can say that I had that 
love for him.” 

Of the letters received from students of those years 
I should like to quote a passage here and there. 

An aviator in France writes: “There was no man 
like him in my college life. Believe me, he has been a 
figure in all we do over here, — we who knew him, — 
and a reason for our doing, too. His loss is so great 
to all of us! . . . He was so fine he will always push us 
on to finding the truth about things. That was his 
great spark, was n’t it?” 

From a second lieutenant in France: “ I loved Carl. 
He was far more to me than just a friend — he was 
father, brother, and friend all in one. He influenced, as 
you know, everything I have done since I knew him 
— for it was his enthusiasm which has been the force 
which determined the direction of my work. And 
the bottom seemed to have fallen out of my whole 
scheme of things when the word just came to me.” 

From one of the young officers at Camp Lewis: 

“When E- told me about Carl’s illness last 

Wednesday, I resolved to go and see him the coming 
week-end. I carried out my resolution, only to find 
that I could see neither him nor you. [This was the 
day before Carl’s death.] It was a great disappoint¬ 
ment to me, so I left some flowers and went away. . . . 
I simply could not leave Seattle without seeing Carl 
once more, so I made up my mind to go out to the 
undertaker’s. The friends I was with discouraged the 
idea, but it was too strong within me. There was a 
void within me which could only be filled by seeing 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


96 

my friend once more. I went out there and stood by 
his side for quite a while. I recalled the happy days 
spent with him on the campus. I thought of his kind¬ 
liness, his loyalty, his devotion. Carl Parker shall 
always occupy a place in the recesses of my memory 
as a true example of nobility. It was hard for me to 
leave, but I felt much better.” 

From one of his women students: “Always from 
the first day when I knew him he seemed to give me 
a joy of life and an inspiration to work which no other 
person or thing has ever given me. And it is a joy and 
an inspiration I shall always keep. I seldom come to 
a stumbling-block in my work that I don’t stop to 
wonder what Carl Parker would do were he solving 
that problem.” 

Another letter I have chosen to quote from was 
written by a former student now in Paris: — 

“We could not do without him. He meant too 
much to us. ... I come now as a young friend to put 
myself by your side a moment and to try to share a 
great sorrow which is mine almost as much as it is 
yours. For I am sure that, after you, there were few 
indeed who loved Carl as much as I. 

“Oh, I am remembering a hundred things! — the 
first day I found you both in the little house on Hearst 
Avenue — the dinners we used to have . . . the times 
I used to come on Sunday morning to find you both, 
and the youngsters — the day just before I graduated 
when mother and I had lunch at your house . . . and, 
finally, that day I left you, and you said, both of you, 
‘Don’t come back without seeing some of the cities 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


97 

of Europe.’ I’d have missed some of the cities to 
have come back and found you both. 

‘‘Some of him we can’t keep. The quaint old gray 
twinkle — the quiet, half-impudent, wholly confident 
poise with which he defied all comers—that inexhaust¬ 
ible and incorrigible fund of humor — those we lose. 
No use to whine — we lose it; write it off, gulp, go on. 

“But other things we keep, none the less. The 
stimulus and impetus and inspiration are not lost, 
and shall not be. No one has counted the youngsters 
he has hauled, by the scruff of the neck as often as 
not, out of a slough of middle-class mediocrity, and 
sent careering off into some welter or current of ideas 
and conjecture. Carl did n’t know where they would 
end, and no more do any of the rest of us. He knew he 
loathed stagnation. And he stirred things and stirred 
people. And the end of the stirring is far from being 
yet known or realized.” 

I like, too, a story one of the Regents told me. He 
ran into a student from his home town and asked how 
his work at the University was going. The boy looked 

at him eagerly and said, “ Mr. M-, I’ve been born 

again! [“ Born again ” — those were his very words.] 
I entered college thinking of it as a preparation for 
making more money when I got out. I’ve come across 
a man named Parker in the faculty and am taking 
everything he gives. Now I know I’d be selling out 
my life to make money the goal. I know now, too, 
that whatever money I do make can never be at the 
expense of the happiness and welfare of any other 
human being.” 




CHAPTER XI 


About this time we had a friend come into our lives 
who was destined to mean great things to the Parkers 
— Max Rosenberg. He had heard Carl lecture once 
or twice, had met him through our good friend Dr. 
Brown, and a warm friendship had developed. In 
the spring of 1916 we were somewhat tempted by a 
call to another University — $1700 was really not a 
fortune to live on, and to make both ends meet and 
prepare for the June-Bug’s coming, Carl had to use 
every spare minute lecturing outside. It discouraged 
him, for he had no time left to read and study. So 
when a call came that appealed to us in several ways, 
besides paying a much larger salary, we seriously 
considered it. About then “Uncle Max” rang up from 
San Francisco and asked Carl to see him before an¬ 
swering this other University, and an appointment 
was made for that afternoon. 

I was to be at a formal luncheon, but told Carl to 
be sure to call me up the minute he left Max — we 
wondered so hard what he might mean. And what he 
did mean was the most wonderful idea that ever 
entered a friend’s head. He felt that Carl had a real 
message to give the world, and that he should write 
a book. He also realized that it was impossible to find 
time for a book under the circumstances. Therefore 
he proposed that Carl should take a year's leave of 
absence and let Max finance him — not only just 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


99 

finance him, but allow for a trip throughout the East 
for him to get the inspiration of contact with other 
men in his field; and enough withal, so that there 
should be no skimping anywhere and the little family 
at home should have everything they needed. 

It seemed to us something too wonderful to believe. 
I remember going back to that lunch-table, after Carl 
had telephoned me only the broadest details, wonder¬ 
ing if it were the same world. That Book — we had 
dreamed of writing that book for so many years — 
the material to be in it changed continually, but al¬ 
ways the longing to write, and no time, no hopes of 
any chance to do it. And the June-Bug coming, and 
more need for money — hence more outside lectures 
than ever. I have no love for the University of Cali¬ 
fornia when I think of that $1700. (I quote from an 
article that came out in New York: “ It is an astound¬ 
ing fact which his University must explain, that he, 
with his great abilities as teacher and leader, his wide 
travel and experience and training, received from the 
University in his last year of service there a salary of 
$1700 a year! The West does not repay commercial 
genius like that.”) For days after Max’s offer we 
hardly knew we were on earth. It was so very much 
the most wonderful thing that could have happened 
to us. Our friends had long ago adopted the phrase 
“ just Parker luck,” and here was an example if there 
ever was one. “Parker luck” indeed it was! 

This all meant, to get the fulness out of it, that 
Carl must make a trip of at least four months in the 
East. At first he planned to return in the middle of it 



100 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


and then go back again; but somehow four months 
spent as we planned it out for him seemed so abso¬ 
lutely marvelous, — an opportunity of a lifetime, — 
that joy for him was greater in my soul than the 
dread of a separation. It was different from any other 
parting we had ever had. I was bound that I would 
not shed a single tear when I saw him off, even though 
it meant the longest time apart we had experienced. 
Three nights before he left, being a bit blue about 
things, for all our fine talk, we prowled down our hill¬ 
side and found our way to our first Charlie Chaplin 
film. We laughed until we cried — we really did. So 
that night, seeing Carl off, we went over that Charlie 
Chaplin film in detail and let ourselves think and talk 
of nothing else. We laughed all over again, and Carl 
went off laughing, and I waved good-bye laughing. 
Bless that Charlie Chaplin film! 

It would not take much imagination to realize 
what that trip meant to Carl — and through him to 
me. From the time he first felt the importance of the 
application of modern psychology to the study of 
economics, he became more and more intellectually 
isolated from his colleagues. They had no interest in, 
no sympathy for, no understanding of, what he was 
driving at. From May, when college closed, to Octo¬ 
ber, when he left for the East, he read prodigiously. 
He had a mind for assimilation — he knew where 
to store every new piece of knowledge he acquired, 
and kept thereby an orderly brain. He read more 
than a book a week: everything he could lay hands 
on in psychology, anthropology, biology, philosophy, 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


101 


psycho-analysis — every field which he felt contrib¬ 
uted to his own growing conviction that orthodox 
economics had served its day. And how he gloried in 
that reading! It had been years since he had been 
able to do anything but just keep up with his daily 
lectures, such was the pressure he was working under. 
Bless his heart, he was always coming across some¬ 
thing that was just too good to hold in, and I would 
hear him come upstairs two steps at a time, bolt into 
the kitchen, and say: “Just listen to this!” And he 
would read an extract from some new-found treasure 
that would make him glow. 

But outside of myself, — and I was only able to 
keep up with him by the merest skimmings, — and 
one or two others at most, there was no one who 
understood what he was driving at. As his reading 
and convictions grew, he waxed more and more out¬ 
raged at the way Economics was handled in his own 
University. He saw student after student having 
every ounce of intellectual curiosity ground out of 
them by a process of economic education that would 
stultify a genius. Any student who continued his 
economic studies did so in spite of the introductory 
work, not because he had had one little ounce of 
enthusiasm aroused in his soul. Carl would walk the 
floor with his hands in his pockets when kindred 
spirits — especially students who had gone through 
the mill, and as seniors or graduates looked back 
outraged at certain courses they had had to flounder 
through — brought up the subject of Economics at 
the University of California. 



102 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


Off he went then on his pilgrimage, — his Research 
Magnificent, — absolutely unknown to almost every 
man he hoped to see before his return. The first stop 
he made was at Columbia, Missouri, to see his idol 
Veblen. He quaked a bit beforehand, — had heard 
Veblen might not see him, — but the second letter 
from Missouri began, “Just got in after thirteen 
hours with Veblen. It went wonderfully and I am 
tickled to death. He O.K.s my idea entirely and said 
I could not go wrong. . . . Gee, but it is some grand 
experience to go up against him.” 

In the next letter he told of a graduate student who 
came out to get his advice regarding a thesis-subject 
in labor. “ I told him to go to his New England home 
and study the reaction of machine-industry on the 
life of the town. That is a typical Veblen subject. It 
scared the student to death, and Veblen chuckled 
over my advice.” In Wisconsin he was especially 
anxious to see Guyer. Of his visit with him he wrote: 
“It was a whiz of a session. He is just my meat.” At 
Yale he saw Keller. “He is a wonder and is going to 
do a lot for me in criticism.” 

Then began the daily letters from New York, and 
every single letter — not only from New York but 
from every other place he happened to be in: Balti¬ 
more, Philadelphia, Cambridge — told of at least one 
intellectual Event — with a capital E — a day. No 
one ever lived who had a more stimulating experience. 
Friends would ask me: “What is the news from Carl?” 
And I would just gasp. Every letter was so full of the 
new influences coming into his life, that it was im- 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


103 

possible to give even an idea of the history in the mak¬ 
ing that was going on with the Parkers. 

In the first days in New York he saw T. H. Morgan. 
“I just walked in on him and introduced myself 
baldly, and he is a corker. A remarkable talker, with 
a mind like a flash. I am to see him again. To-morrow 
will be a big day for me — I ’ll see Hollingworth, and 
very probably Thorndike, and I ’ll know then some¬ 
thing of what I’ll get out of New York.” Next day: 
“ Called on Hollingworth to-day. He gave me some 
invaluable data and opinions. . . . To-morrow I see 
Thorndike.” And the next day: “I’m so joyful and 
excited over Thorndike. He was so enthusiastic over 
my work. . . . He at once had brass-tack ideas. Said 
I was right — that strikes usually started because of 
small and very human violations of man’s innate dis¬ 
positions.” 

Later he called on Professor W. C. Mitchell. “He 
went into my thesis very fully and is all for it. Pro¬ 
fessor Mitchell knows more than any one the impor¬ 
tance of psychology to economics and he is all for my 
study. Gee, but I get excited after such a session. 
I bet I’ll get out a real book, my girl!” 

After one week in New York he wrote: “The trip 
has paid for itself now, and I’m dead eager to view 
the time when I begin my writing.” Later: “Just got 
in from a six-hour session with the most important 
group of employers in New York. I sat in on a meet¬ 
ing of the Building Trades Board where labor dele¬ 
gates and employers appeared. After two hours of it 
(awfully interesting) the Board took me to dinner and 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


104 

we talked labor stuff till ten-thirty. Gee, it was fine, 
and I got oceans of stuff.” 

Then came Boas, and more visits with Thorndike. 
“ To-night I put in six hours with Thorndike, and am 
pleased plum to death. . . . Under his friendly stimu¬ 
lus I developed a heap of new ideas; and say, wait 
till I begin writing! I ’ll have ten volumes at the pres¬ 
ent rate. . . . This visit with Thorndike was worth 
the whole trip.” (And in turn Thorndike wrote me: 
“The days that he and I spent together in New York 
talking of these things are one of my finest memories 
and I appreciate the chance that let me meet him.”) 
He wrote from the Harvard Club, where Walter Lipp- 
mann put him up: “The Dad is a ‘prominent club¬ 
man.’ Just lolled back at lunch, in a room with ani¬ 
mals (stuffed) all around the walls, and waiters flying 
about, and a ceiling up a mile. Gee!” Later: “I just 
had a most wonderful visit with the Director of the 
National Committee for Mental Hygiene, Dr. Solman, 
and he is a wiz, a wiz!” 

Next day: “Had a remarkable visit with Dr. 
Gregory this A.M. He is one of the greatest psychia¬ 
trists in New York and up on balkings, business ten¬ 
sion, and the mental effect of monotonous work. He 
was so worked up over my explanation of unrest (a 
mental status) through instinct-balkings other than 
sex, that he asked if I would consider using his big 
psychopathic ward as a laboratory field for my own 
work. Then he dated me up for a luncheon at which 
three of the biggest mental specialists in New York 
will be present, to talk over the manner in which 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


105 

psychiatry will aid my research! I can’t say how 
tickled I am over his attitude.” Next letter: “At ten 
reached Dr. Pierce Bailey’s, the big psychiatrist, and 
for an hour and a half we talked, and I was simply 
tickled to death. He is really a wonder and I was very 
enthused. . . . Before leaving he said: ‘You come to 
dinner Friday night here and I will have Dr. Paton 
from Princeton and I ’ll get in some more to meet you.’ 

. . . Then I beat it to the ‘New Republic’ offices, and 
sat down to dinner with the staff plus Robert Bruere, 
and the subject became ‘What is a labor policy?’ The 
Dad, he did his share, he did, and had a great row 
with Walter Lippmann and Bruere. Walter Lippmann 
said: ‘This won’t do — you have made me doubt a 
lot of things. You come to lunch with me Friday at 
the Harvard Club and we’ll thrash it all out.’ Says I, 
‘All right!’ Then says Croly, ‘This won’t do; we’ll 
have a dinner here the following Monday night, and 
I ’ll get Felix Frankfurter down from Boston, and 
we’ll thrash it out some more!’ Says I, ‘All right!’ 
And says Mr. Croly, private, ‘You come to dinner 
with us on Sunday!’ — ‘All right,’ sez Dad. Dr. 
Gregory has me with Dr. Solman on Monday, and 
Harry Overstreet on Wednesday, Thorndike on Sat¬ 
urday, and gee, but I ’ll beat it for New Haven on 
Thursday, or I’ll die of up-torn brain.” 

Are you realizing what this all meant to my Carl — 
until recently reading and pegging away unencour¬ 
aged in his basement study up on the Berkeley hills? 

The next day he heard Roosevelt at the Ritz- 
Carlton. “Then I watched that remarkable man 


106 AN AMERICAN IDYLL 

wind the crowd almost around his finger. It was 
great, and pure psychology; and say, fool women and 
some fool men; but T.R. went on blithely as if every 
one was an intellectual giant.” That night a dinner 
with Winston Churchill. Next letter: “Had a simply 
superb talk with Hollingworth for two and a half 
hours this afternoon. . . . The dinner was the four 
biggest psychiatrists in New York and Dad. Made me 
simply yell, it did. ... It was for my book simply 
superb. All is going so wonderfully.” Next day: “Now 
about the Thorndike dinner: it was grand. ... I can’t 
tell you how much these talks are maturing my ideas 
about the book. I think in a different plane and am 
certain that my ideas are surer. There have come up 
a lot of odd problems touching the conflict, so-called, 
between intelligence and instinct, and these I’m get¬ 
ting thrashed out grandly.” After the second “New 
Republic” dinner he wrote: “Lots of important people 
there . . . Felix Frankfurter, two judges, and the two 
Goldmarks, Pierce Bailey, etc., and the whole staff. 
. . . Had been all day with Dr. Gregory and other 
psychiatrists and had met Police Commissioner 
Woods ... a wonderfully rich day. ... I must run 
for a date with Professor Robinson and then to meet 
Howe, the Immigration Commissioner.” 

Then a trip to Ellis Island, and at midnight that 
same date he wrote: “Just had a most truly remark¬ 
able — eight-thirty to twelve — visit with Professor 
Robinson, he who wrote that European history we 
bought in Germany.” Then a trip to Philadelphia, 
being dined and entertained by various members of 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


107 

the Wharton School faculty. Then the Yale-Harvard 
game, followed by three days and two nights in the 
psychopathic ward at Sing Sing. “I found in the 
psychiatrist at the prison a true wonder — Dr. Glueck. 
He has a viewpoint on instincts which differs from 
any one that I have met.” The next day, back in 
New York: “Just had a most remarkable visit with 
Thomas Mott Osborne.” Later in the same day: “Just 
had an absolutely grand visit and lunch with Walter 
Lippmann ... it was about the best talk with regard 
to my book that I have had in the East. He is an 
intellectual wonder and a big, good-looking, friendly 
boy. I’m for him a million.” 

Then his visit with John Dewey. “ I put up to him 
my regular questions — the main one being the im¬ 
portance of the conflict between MacDougall and 
the Freudians. . . . He was cordiality itself. I am 
expecting red-letter days with him. My knowledge of 
the subject is increasing fast.” Then a visit with 
Irving Fisher at New Haven. The next night “was 
simply remarkable.” Irving Fisher took him to a 
banquet in New York, in honor of some French digni¬ 
taries, with President Wilson present — “at seven 
dollars a plate!” As to President Wilson, “He was 
simply great — almost the greatest, in fact is the 
greatest, speaker I have ever heard.” 

Then a run down to Cambridge, every day crammed 
to the edges. “Had breakfast with Felix Frankfurter. 
He has the grand spirit and does so finely appreciate 
what my subject means. He walked me down to see 
a friend of his, Laski, intellectually a sort of marvel 




io8 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


— knows psychology and philosophy cold — grand 
talk. Then I called on Professor Gay and he dated 
me for a dinner to-morrow night. Luncheon given to 
me by Professor Taussig — that was fine. . . . Then 
I flew to see E. B. Holt for an hour [his second visit 
there]. Had a grand visit, and then at six was taken 
with Gay to dinner with the visiting Deans at the 
Boston Harvard Club.” (Mr. Holt wrote: “I met 
Mr. Parker briefly in the winter of 1916-17, briefly, 
but so very delightfully! I felt that he was an ally and 
a brilliant one.”) 

I give these many details because you must appreci¬ 
ate what this new wonder-world meant to a man who 
was considered nobody much by his own University. 

Then one day a mere card: “This is honestly a day 
in which no two minutes of free time exist — so 
superbly grand has it gone and so fruitful for the 
book — the best of all yet. One of the biggest men in 
the United States (Cannon of Harvard) asked me to 
arrange my thesis to be analyzed by a group of ex¬ 
perts in the field.” Next day he wrote: “Up at six- 
forty-five, and at seven-thirty I was at Professor 
Cannon’s. I put my thesis up to him strong and got 
one of the most encouraging and stimulating recep¬ 
tions I have had. He took me in to meet his wife, and 
said: ‘This young man has stimulated and aroused 
me greatly. We must get his thesis formally before a 
group.’” Later, from New York: “From seven-thirty 
to eleven-thirty I argued with Dr. A. A. Brill, who 
translated all of Freud!!! and it was simply wonderful. 
I came home at twelve and wrote up a lot.” 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


109 

Later he went to Washington with Walter Lipp- 
mann. They ran into Colonel House on the train, and 
talked foreign relations for two and a half hours. “ My 
hair stood on end at the importance of what he said.” 
From Washington he wrote: “Am having one of the 
Great Experiences of my young life.” Hurried full 
days in Philadelphia, with a most successful talk 
before the University of Pennsylvania Political and 
Social Science Conference (“Successful,” was the 
report to me later of several who were present), and 
extreme kindness and hospitality from all the Whar¬ 
ton group. He rushed to Baltimore, and at midnight, 
December 31, he wrote: “ I had from eleven-thirty to 
one p.m. an absolute supergrand talk with Adolph 
Meyer and John Watson. He is a grand young south¬ 
erner and simply knows his behavioristic psychology 
in a way to make one’s hair stand up. We talked my 
plan clear out and they are enthusiastic. . . . Things 
are going grandly .” Next day: “ Just got in from din¬ 
ner with Adolph Meyer. He is simply a wonder. . . . 
At nine-thirty I watched Dr. Campbell give a girl 
Freudian treatment for a suicide mania. She had been 
a worker in a straw-hat factory and had a true indus¬ 
trial psychosis — the kind I am looking for.” Then, 
later: “There is absolutely no doubt that the trip 
has been my making. I have learned a lot of back¬ 
ground, things, and standards, that will put their 
stamp on my development.” 

Almost every letter would tell of some one visit 
which “alone was worth the trip East.” Around 
Christmastime home-longings got extra strong — he 



no 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


wrote five letters in three days. I really wish I could 
quote some from them — where he said for instance: 
“ My, but it is good for a fellow to be with his family 
and awful to be away from it.” And again: “I want 
to be interrupted, I do. I ’m all for that. I remember 
how Jim and Nand used to come into my study for a 
kiss and then go hastily out upon urgent affairs. I ’m 
for that. ... I’ve got my own folk and they make the 
rest of the world thin and pale. The blessedness of 
babies is beyond words, but the blessedness of a wife 
is such that one can’t start in on it.” 

Then came the Economic Convention at Columbus 
— letters too full to begin to quote from them. “ I’m 
simply having the time of my life . . . every one is 
here.” In a talk when he was asked to fill in at the 
last minute, he presented “ two arguments why trade- 
unions alone could not be depended on to bring desir¬ 
able change in working conditions through collective 
bargaining: one, because they were numerically so 
few in contrast to the number of industrial workers, 
and, two, because the reforms about to be demanded 
were technical, medical, and generally of scientific 
character, and skilled experts employed by the state 
would be necessary.” 

Back again in New York, he wrote: “It just raises 
my hair to feel I’m not where a Dad ought to be. My 
blessed, precious family! I tell you there isn’t any¬ 
thing in this world like a wife and babies and I’m for 
that life that puts me close. I’m near smart enough 
to last a heap of years. Though when I see how my 
trip makes me feel alive in my head and enthusiastic, 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


111 


I know it has been worth while. . . Along in Jan¬ 
uary he worked his thesis up in writing. “Last night 
I read my paper to the Robinsons after the dinner and 
they had Mr. and Mrs. John Dewey there. A most 
superb and grand discussion followed, the Deweys 
going home at eleven-thirty and I stayed to talk to 
one A.M. I slept dreaming wildly of the discussion. . . . 
Then had an hour and a half with Dewey on certain 
moot points. That talk was even more superb and 
resultful to me and I ’m just about ready to quit. . . . 
I need now to write and read.” 

I quote a bit here and there from this paper writ¬ 
ten in New York in 1917, because, though hurriedly 
put together and never meant for publication, it de¬ 
scribes Carl’s newer approach to Economics and es¬ 
pecially to the problem of Labor. 

“In 1914 I was asked to investigate a riot among 
2800 migratory hop-pickers in California which had 
resulted in five deaths, many-fold more wounded, 
hysteria, fear, and a strange orgy of irresponsible per¬ 
secution by the county authorities — and, on the 
side of the laborers, conspiracy, barn-burnings, 
sabotage, and open revolutionary propaganda. I had 
been teaching labor-problems for a year, and had 
studied them in two American universities, under 
Sidney Webb in London, and in four universities of 
Germany. I found that I had no fundamentals which 
could be called good tools with which to begin my 
analysis of this riot. And I felt myself merely a con¬ 
ventional if astonished onlooker before the theoreti¬ 
cally abnormal but manifestly natural emotional 



112 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


activity which swept over California. After what must 
have been a most usual intellectual cycle of, first, help¬ 
lessness, then conventional cataloguing, some ration¬ 
alizing, some moralizing, and an extensive feeling of 
shallowness and inferiority, I called the job done. 

“By accident, somewhat later, I was loaned two 
books of Freud, and I felt after the reading, that I 
had found a scientific approach which might lead to 
the discovery of important fundamentals for a study 
of unrest and violence. Under this stimulation, I read, 
during a year and a half, general psychology, physi¬ 
ology and anthropology, eugenics, all the special 
material I could find on Mendelism, works on mental 
hygiene, feeblemindedness, insanity, evolution of 
morals and character, and finally found a resting- 
place in a field which seems to be best designated as 
Abnormal and Behavioristic Psychology. My quest 
throughout this experience seemed to be pretty stead¬ 
ily a search for those irreducible fundamentals which 
I could use in getting a technically decent opinion 
on that riot. In grand phrases, I was searching for the 
Scientific Standard of Value to be used in analyzing 
Human Behavior. 

“Economics (which officially holds the analysis of 
labor-problems) has been allowed to devote itself 
almost entirely to the production of goods, and to 
neglect entirely the consumption of goods and human 
organic welfare. The lip-homage given by orthodox 
economics to the field of consumption seems to be 
inspired merely by the feeling that disaster might 
overcome production if workers were starved or busi- 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


n 3 

ness men discouraged. . . . So, while official economic 
science tinkers at its transient institutions which 
flourish in one decade and pass out in the next, abnor¬ 
mal and behavioristic psychology, physiology, psychi¬ 
atry, are building in their laboratories, by induction 
from human specimens of modern economic life, a 
standard of human values and an elucidation of 
behavior fundamentals which alone we must use in 
our legislative or personal modification of modern 
civilization. It does not seem an overstatement to 
say that orthodox economics has cleanly overlooked 
two of the most important generalizations about hu¬ 
man life which can be phrased, and those are, — 

“That human life is dynamic, that change, move¬ 
ment, evolution, are its basic characteristics. 

“That self-expression, and therefore freedom of 
choice and movement, are prerequisites to a satisfy¬ 
ing human state.” 

After giving a description of the instincts he 
writes: — 

“The importance to me of the following description 
of the innate tendencies or instincts lies in their rela¬ 
tion to my main explanation of economic behavior 
which is, — 

“First, that these tendencies are persistent, are 
far less warped or modified by the environment than 
we believe; that they function quite as they have for 
several hundred thousand years; that they, as mo¬ 
tives, in their various normal or perverted habit- 
form, can at times dominate singly the entire behavior, 
and act as if they were a clear character dominant. 


ii 4 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


“ Secondly, that if the environment through any 
of the conventional instruments of repression, such 
as religious orthodoxy, university mental discipline, 
economic inferiority, imprisonment, physical dis¬ 
figurement, — such as short stature, hare-lip, etc., — 
repress the full psychological expression in the field 
of these tendencies, then a psychic revolt, slipping 
into abnormal mental functioning, takes place, and 
society accuses the revolutionist of being either will¬ 
fully inefficient, alcoholic, a syndicalist, supersensi¬ 
tive, an agnostic, or insane.’’ 

I hesitate somewhat to give his programme as set 
forth in this paper. I have already mentioned that it 
was written in the spring of 1917, and hurriedly. In 
referring to this very paper in a letter from New York, 
he said, “Of course it is written in part to call out com¬ 
ments, and so the statements are strong and unmodi¬ 
fied. ” Let that fact, then, be borne in mind, and also 
the fact that he may have altered his views somewhat 
in the light of his further studies and readings — al¬ 
though again, such studies may only have strength¬ 
ened the following ideas. I cannot now trust to my 
memory for what discussions we may have had on 
the subject. 

“Reform means a militant minority, or, to follow 
Trotter, a small Herd. This little Herd would give 
council, relief, and recuperation to its members. The 
members of the Herd will be under merciless fire from 
the convention-ridden members of general society. 
They will be branded outlaws, radicals, agnostics, 
impossible, crazy. They will be lucky to be out of jail 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


"5 

most of the time. They will work by trial and study, 
gaining wisdom by their errors, as Sidney Webb and 
the Fabians did. In the end, after a long time, parts 
of the social sham will collapse, as it did in England, 
and small promises will become milestones of progress. 

“From where, then, can we gain recruits for this 
minority? Two real sources seem in existence — the 
universities and the field of mental-disease specula¬ 
tion and hospital experiment. The one, the universi¬ 
ties, with rare if wonderful exceptions, are fairly hope¬ 
less; the other is not only rich in promise, but few 
realize how full in performance. Most of the literature 
which is gripping that great intellectual no-man’s land 
of the silent readers, is basing its appeal, and its story, 
on the rather uncolored and bald facts which come 
from Freud, Trotter, Robinson, Dewey, E. B. Holt, 
Lippmann, Morton Prince, Pierce, Bailey, Jung, 
Hart, Overstreet, Thorndike, Campbell, Meyer and 
Watson, Stanley Hall, Adler, White. It is from this 
field of comparative or abnormal psychology that the 
challenge to industrialism and the programme of 
change will come. 

“But suppose you ask me to be concrete and give 
an idea of such a programme. 

“Take simply the beginning of life, take childhood, 
for that is where the human material is least pro¬ 
tected, most plastic, and where most injury to-day 
is done. In the way of general suggestion, I would say, 
exclude children from formal disciplinary life, such 
as that of all industry and most schools, up to the 
age of eighteen. After excluding them, what shall we 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


116 

do with them? Ask John Dewey, I suggest, or read 
his ‘Schools of To-morrow,’ or ‘Democracy and Edu¬ 
cation.’ It means tremendous, unprecedented money 
expense to ensure an active trial and error-learning 
activity; a chance naturally to recapitulate the racial 
trial and error-learning experience; a study and prepa¬ 
ration of those periods of life in which fall the ripening 
of the relatively late maturing instincts; a general 
realizing that wisdom can come only from experience, 
and not from the Book. It means psychologically cal¬ 
culated childhood opportunity, in which the now 
stifled instincts of leadership, workmanship, hero- 
worship, hunting, migration, meditation, sex, could 
grow and take their foundation place in the psychic 
equipment of a biologically promising human being. 
To illustrate in trivialities, no father, with knowledge 
of the meaning of the universal bent towards work¬ 
manship, would give his son a puzzle if he knew of the 
Mecano or Erector toys, and no father would give the 
Mecano if he had grasped the educational potential¬ 
ity of the gift to his child of $10 worth of lumber and 
a set of good carpenter’s tools. There is now enough 
loose wisdom around devoted to childhood, its needed 
liberties and experiences, both to give the children 
of this civilization their first evolutionary chance, and 
to send most teachers back to the farm. 

“In the age-period of 18 to 30 would fall that 
pseudo-educational monstrosity, the undergraduate 
university, and the degrading popular activities of 
‘beginning a business’ or ‘picking up a trade.’ Much 
money must be spent here. Perhaps few fields of ac- 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


n 7 


tivity have been conventionalized as much as univer¬ 
sity education. Here, just where a superficial theorist 
would expect to find enthusiasm, emancipated minds, 
and hope, is found fear, convention, a mean instinct- 
life, no spirit of adventure, little curiosity, in general 
no promise of preparedness. No wonder philosophical 
idealism flourishes and Darwin is forgotten. 

“The first two years of University life should be 
devoted to the Science of Human Behavior. Much of 
to-day's biology, zoology, history, if it is interpretive, 
psychology, if it is behavioristic, philosophy, if it is 
pragmatic, literature, if it had been written involun¬ 
tarily, would find its place here. The last two years 
could be profitably spent in appraising with that ulti¬ 
mate standard of value gained in the first two years, 
the various institutions and instruments used by 
civilized man. All instruction would be objective, 
scientific, and emancipated from convention — won¬ 
derful prospect! 

“In industrial labor and in business employments 
a new concept, a new going philosophy must be un¬ 
reservedly accepted, which has, instead of the ideal 
of forcing the human beings to mould their habits to 
assist the continued existence of the inherited order 
of things, an ideal of moulding all business institu¬ 
tions and ideas of prosperity in the interests of scien¬ 
tific evolutionary aims and large human pleasures. 
As Pigou has said, ‘Environment has its children as 
well as men.’ Monotony in labor, tedium in office- 
work, time spent in business correspondence, the bore¬ 
dom of running a sugar refinery, would be asked to 


118 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


step before the bar of human affairs and get a health 
standardization. To-day industry produces goods 
that cost more than they are worth, are consumed 
by persons who are degraded by the consuming; it 
is destroying permanently the raw-material source 
which, science has painfully explained, could be made 
inexhaustible. Some intellectual revolution must come 
which will ^-emphasize business and industry and 
^-emphasize most other ways of self-expression. 

“ In Florence, around 1300, Giotto painted a pic¬ 
ture, and the day it was to be hung in St. Mark’s, the 
town closed down for a holiday, and the people, with 
garlands of flowers and songs, escorted the picture 
from the artist’s studio to the church. Three weeks 
ago I stood, in company with 500 silent, sallow-faced 
men, at a corner on Wall Street, a cold and wet corner, 
till young Morgan issued from J. P. Morgan & Com¬ 
pany, and walked 20 feet to his carriage. — We pro¬ 
duce, probably, per capita, 1000 times more in weight 
of ready-made clothing, Irish lace, artificial flowers, 
terra cotta, movie-films, telephones, and printed mat¬ 
ter than those Florentines did, but we have, with our 
100,000,000 inhabitants, yet to produce that little 
town, her Dante, her Andrea del Sarto, her Michael 
Angelo, her Leonardo da Vinci, her Savonarola, her 
Giotto, or the group who followed Giotto’s picture. 
Florence had a marvelous energy — re-lease experi¬ 
ence. All our industrial formalism, our conventional¬ 
ized young manhood, our schematized universities, 
are instruments of balk and thwart, are machines to 
produce protesting abnormality, to block efficiency. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


119 

So the problem of industrial labor is one with the 
problem of the discontented business man, the indif¬ 
ferent student, the unhappy wife, the immoral min¬ 
ister— it is one of maladjustment between a fixed 
human nature and a carelessly ordered world. The 
result is suffering, insanity, racial-perversion, and 
danger. The final cure is gaining acceptance for a new 
standard of morality; the first step towards this is to 
break down the mores-inhibitions to free experimental 
thinking.” 

If only the time had been longer — if only the Book 
itself could have been finished! For he had a great 
message. He was writing about a thousand words a 
day on it the following summer, at Castle Crags, 
when the War Department called him into mediation 
work and not another word did he ever find time to 
add to it. It stands now about one third done. I shall 
get that third ready for publication, together with 
some of his shorter articles. There have been many 
who have offered their services in completing the 
Book, but the field is so new, Carl’s contribution so 
unique, that few men in the whole country under¬ 
stand the ground enough to be of service. It was 
not so much to be a book on Labor as on Labor- 
Psychology— and that is almost an unexplored field. 


CHAPTER XII 


Three days after Carl started east, on his arrival in 
Seattle, President Suzzallo called him to the Univer¬ 
sity of Washington as Head of the Department of 
Economics and Dean of the College of Business Ad¬ 
ministration, his work to begin the following autumn. 
It seemed an ideal opportunity. He wrote: “ I am very, 
very attracted by Suzzallo. . . . He said that I should 
be allowed to plan the work as I wished and call the 
men I wished, and could call at least five. I cannot 
imagine a better man to work with nor a better propo¬ 
sition than the one he put up to me. . . . The job itself 
will let me teach what I wish and in my own way. 
I can give Introductory Economics, and Labor, and 
Industrial Organization, etc.” Later, he telegraphed 
from New York, where he had again seen Suzzallo: 
“Have accepted Washington’s offer. . . . Details of 
job even more satisfactory than before.” 

So, sandwiched in between all the visits and inter¬ 
views over the Book, were many excursions about 
locating new men for the University of Washington. 
I like to think of what the three Pennsylvania men 
he wanted had to say about him. Seattle seemed very 
far away to them — they were doubtful, very. Then 
they heard the talk before the Conference referred to 
above, and every one of the three accepted his call. 
As one of them expressed it to his wife later: “ I’d go 
anywhere for that man.” Between that Seattle call 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


121 


and his death there were eight universities, some of 
them the biggest in the country, which wished Carl 
Parker to be on their faculties. One smaller university 
held out the presidency to him. Besides this, there 
were nine jobs outside of University work that were 
offered him, from managing a large mine to doing 
research work in Europe. He had come into his own. 

It was just before we left Berkeley that the Univer¬ 
sity of California asked Carl to deliver an address, 
explaining his approach to economics. It was, no 
doubt, the most difficult talk he ever gave. There 
under his very nose sat his former colleagues, his fel¬ 
low members in the Economics Department, and he 
had to stand up in public and tell them just how in¬ 
adequate he felt most of their teaching to be. The 
head of the Department came in a trifle late and left 
immediately after the lecture. He could hardly have 
been expected to include himself in the group who 
gathered later around Carl to express their interest 
in his stand. I shall quote a bit from this paper to 
show Carl's ideas on orthodox economics. 

“This brings one to perhaps the most costly delin¬ 
quency of modern Economics, and that is its refusal 
to incorporate into its weighings and appraisals the 
facts and hypotheses of modern psychology. Nothing 
in the postulates of the science of Economics is as 
ludicrous as its catalogue of human wants. Though 
the practice of ascribing ‘faculties’ to man has been 
passed by psychology into deserved discard, Econom¬ 
ics still maintains, as basic human qualities, a galaxy 
of vague and rather spiritual faculties. It matters not 


122 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


that, in the place of the primitive concepts of man 
stimulated to activity by a single trucking sense, or a 
free and uninfluenced force called a soul, or a ‘desire 
for financial independence,’ psychology has estab¬ 
lished a human being possessed of more instincts than 
any animal, and with a psychical nature whose activi¬ 
ties fall completely within the causal law. 

“It would be a great task and a useless one to work 
through current economic literature and gather the 
strange and mystical collection of human dispositions 
which economists have named the springs of human 
activity. They have no relation to the modern re¬ 
searches into human behavior of psychology or physi¬ 
ology. They have an interesting relation only to the 
moral attributes postulated in current religion. 

“But more important and injurious than the cari¬ 
caturing of wants has been the disappearance from 
Economics of any treatment or interest in human 
behavior and the evolution of human character in 
Economic life. This is explained in large part by the 
self-divorce of Economics from the biological field; 
but also in an important way by the exclusion from 
Economics of considerations of consumption. 

“Only under the influence of the social and edu¬ 
cational psychologists and behaviorists could child- 
labor, the hobo, unemployment, poverty, and crimi¬ 
nality be given their just emphasis; and it seems 
accurate to ascribe the social sterility of Economic 
theory and its programme to its ignorance and lack 
of interest in modern comparative psychology. 

“A deeper knowledge of human instincts would 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


12 3 

never have allowed American economists to keep 
their faith in a simple rise of wages as an all-cure for 
labor unrest. In England, with a homogeneous labor 
class, active in politics, maintaining university exten¬ 
sion courses, spending their union’s income on intri¬ 
cate betterment schemes, and wealthy in tradition — 
there a rise in wages meant an increase in welfare. 
But in the United States, with a heterogeneous labor 
class, bereft of their social norms by the violence of 
their uprooting from the old world, dropped into an 
unprepared and chaotic American life, with its insidi¬ 
ous prestige —- here a rise in wages could and does 
often mean added ostentation, social climbing, su¬ 
perficial polishing, new vice. This social perversion 
in the consuming of the wage-increase is without the 
ken of the economist. He cannot, if he would, think 
of it, for he has no mental tools, no norms applicable 
for entrance into the medley of human motives called 
consumption. 

“For these many reasons economic thinking has 
been weak and futile in the problems of conservation, 
of haphazard invention, of unrestricted advertising, 
of anti-social production, of the inadequacy of income, 
of criminality. These are problems within the zone of 
the intimate life of the population. They are economic 
problems, and determine efficiencies within the whole 
economic life. The divorcing for inspection of the field 
of production from the rest of the machinery of civili¬ 
zation has brought into practice a false method, and 
the values arrived at have been unhappily half-truths. 
America to-day is a monument to the truth that 


124 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


growth in wealth becomes significant for national wel¬ 
fare only when it is joined with an efficient and social 
policy in its consumption. 

“ Economics will only save itself through an alliance 
with the sciences of human behavior, psychology, and 
biology, and through a complete emancipation from 
* prosperity mores. ’. . . The sin of Economics has been 
the divorce of its work from reality, of announcing an 
analysis of human activity with the human element 
left out.” 

One other point remained ever a sore spot with 
Carl, and that was the American university and its 
accomplishments. In going over his writings, I find 
scattered through the manuscripts explosions on the 
ways, means, and ends, of academic education in our 
United States. For instance, — 

“Consider the paradox of the rigidity of the uni¬ 
versity student’s scheme of study, and the vagaries 
and whims of the scholarly emotion. Contemplate 
the forcing of that most delicate of human attributes, 
i.e., interest, to bounce forth at the clang of a gong. 
To illustrate: the student is confidently expected to 
lose himself in fine contemplation of Plato’s philoso¬ 
phy up to eleven o’clock, and then at 11.07, with 
no important mental cost, to take up a profitable and 
scholarly investigation into the banking problems of 
the United States. He will be allowed by the proper 
academic committee German Composition at one 
o’clock, diseases of citrus fruit trees at two, and at 
three he is asked to exhibit a fine sympathy in the 
Religions and Customs of the Orient. Between 4.07 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


12 5 


and five it is calculated that he can with profit indulge 
in gymnasium recreation, led by an instructor who 
counts out loud and waves his arms in time to a 
mechanical piano. Between five and six, this student, 
led by a yell-leader, applauds football practice. The 
growing tendency of American university students to 
spend their evenings in extravagant relaxation, at the 
moving pictures, or in unconventional dancing, is 
said to be willful and an indication of an important 
moral sag of recent years. It would be interesting also 
to know if Arkwright, Hargreaves, Watt, or Darwin, 
Edison, Henry Ford, or the Wrights, or other persons 
of desirable if unconventional mechanical imagina¬ 
tion, were encouraged in their scientific meditation by 
scholastic experiences of this kind. Every American 
university has a department of education devoted to 
establishing the most effective methods of imparting 
knowledge to human beings.” 

From the same article: — 

“The break in the systematization which an irregu¬ 
lar and unpredictable thinker brings arouses a per¬ 
sistent if unfocused displeasure. Hence we have the 
accepted and cultivated institutions, such as our 
universities, our churches, our clubs, sustaining with 
care mediocre standards of experimental thought. 
European critics have long compared the repressed 
and uninspiring intellect of the American undergrad¬ 
uate with the mobile state of mind of the Russian and 
German undergraduates which has made their insti¬ 
tutions the centre of revolutionary change propa¬ 
ganda. To one who knows in any intimate way the 


126 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


life of the American student, it becomes only an un¬ 
comfortable humor to visualize any of his campuses 
as the origins of social protests. The large industry 
of American college athletics and its organization-for- 
victory concept, the tendency to set up an efficient 
corporation as the proper university model, the exten¬ 
sive and unashamed university advertising, and con¬ 
sequent apprehension of public opinion, the love of 
size and large registration, that strange psychological 
abnormality, organized cheering, the curious compan¬ 
ionship of state universities and military drill, regular 
examinations and rigidly prescribed work — all these 
interesting characteristics are, as is natural in char¬ 
acter-formation, both cause and effect. It becomes an 
easy prophecy within behaviorism to forecast that 
American universities will continue regular and medi¬ 
ocre in mental activity and reasonably devoid of 
intellectual bent toward experimental thinking.” 

Perhaps here is where I may quote a letter Carl 
received just before leaving Berkeley, and his answer 
to it. This correspondence brings up several points 
on which Carl at times received criticism, and I 
should like to give the two sides, each so typical of 
the point of view it represents. 


February 28, 1917 

My dear Carleton Parker, — 

When we so casually meet it is as distressing as it 
is amusing to me, to know that the God I intuitively 
defend presents to you the image of the curled and 
scented monster of the Assyrian sculpture. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


127 

He was never that to me, and the visualization of 
an imaginative child is a remarkable thing. From the 
first, the word “God,” spoken in the comfortable (al¬ 
most smug) atmosphere of the old Unitarian congre¬ 
gation, took my breath and tranced me into a vision 
of a great flood of vibrating light, and only light. 

I wonder if, in your childhood, some frightening 
picture in some old book was not the thing that you 
are still fighting against? So that, emancipated as you 
are, you are still a little afraid, and must perforce 
— with a remainder of the brave swagger of youth — 
set up a barrier of authorities to fight behind, and, 
quite unconsciously, you are thus building yourself 
into a vault in which no flowers can bloom — because 
you have sealed the high window of the imagination 
so that the frightening God may not look in upon 
you — this same window through which simple men 
get an illumination that saves their lives, and in the 
light of which they communicate kindly, one with 
the other, their faith and hopes? 

I am impelled to say this to you, first, because of 
the responsibility which rests upon you in your rela¬ 
tion to young minds; and, second, I like you and your 
eagerness and the zest for Truth that you transmit. 

You are dedicated to the pursuit of Truth, and 
you afford us the dramatic incidents of your pursuit. 

Yet up to this moment it seems to me you are 
accepting Truth at second-hand. 

I counted seventeen “authorities” quoted, chapter 
and verse (and then abandoned the enumeration), in 
the free talk of the other evening; and asked myself 


128 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


if this reverence of the student for the master, was all 
that we were ultimately to have of that vivid indi¬ 
vidual whom we had so counted upon as Carl Parker? 

I wondered, too, if, in the great opportunity that 
has come to you, those simple country boys and girls 
of Washington were to be thus deprived, — were to 
find not you but your “ authorities,’’ — because Carl 
Parker refused (even ever so modestly) to learn that 
Truth, denied the aid of the free imagination, takes 
revenge upon her disciple, by shutting off from him 
the sources of life by which a man is made free, 
and reducing his mind — his rich, variable, potential 
mind — to the mechanical operation of a repetitious 
machine. 

I feel this danger for you, and for the youths you 
are to educate, so poignantly that I venture to write 
with this frankness. 

Your present imprisonment is not necessarily a life 
sentence; but your satisfaction in it — your accept¬ 
ance of the routine of your treadmill — is chilling to 
the hopes of those who have waited upon your prog¬ 
ress; and it imperils your future — as well as that 
hope we have in the humanities that are to be im¬ 
planted in the minds of the young people you are to 
instruct. We would not have you remain under the 
misapprehension that Truth alone can ever serve 
humanity — Truth remains sterile until it is married 
to Goodness. That marriage is consummated in the 
high flight of the imagination, and its progeny is of 
beauty. 

You need beauty — you need verse and color and 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


129 

music — you need all the escapes — all the doors 
wide open — and this seemingly impertinent letter 
is merely the appeal of one human creature to an¬ 
other, for the sake of all the human creatures whom 
you have it in your power to endow with chains or 
with wings. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Bruce Porter. 


My dear Bruce Porter, — 

My present impatient attitude towards a mystic 
being without doubt has been influenced by some 
impression of my childhood, but not the terror¬ 
bringing creatures you suggest. My family was one 
of the last three which clung to a dying church in my 
country town. I, though a boy of twelve, passed the 
plate for two years while the minister’s daughter sang 
a solo. Our village was not a happy one, and the in¬ 
congruity of our emotional prayers and ecstasies of 
imagery, and the drifting dullness and meanness of 
the life outside, filtered in some way into my boy 
mind. I saw that suffering was real and pressing, and 
so many suffered resignedly; and that imagery and my 
companionship with a God (I was highly “ religious” 
then) worked in a self-centred circle. I never strayed 
from the deadly taint of some gentle form of egotism. 
I was then truly in a “ vault.” I did things for a system 
of ethics, not because of a fine rush of social brotherly 
intuition. My imagination was ever concerned with 
me and my prospects, my salvation. I honestly and 
soberly believe that your “high window of the imag- 


130 AN AMERICAN IDYLL 

ination” works out in our world as such a force for 
egotism; it is a self-captivating thing, it divorces man 
from the plain and bitter realities of life, it brings an 
anti-social emancipation to him. I can sincerely make 
this terrible charge against the modern world, and 
that is, that it is its bent towards mysticism, its 
blinding itself through hysteria, which makes possible 
in its civilization its desperate inequalities of life- 
expression, its tortured children, its unhappy men 
and women, its wasted potentiality. We have not 
been humble and asked what is man; we have not 
allowed ourselves to weigh sorrow. It is in such a use 
that our powers of imagination could be brotherly. 
We look on high in ecstasy, and fail to be on flame 
because of the suffering of those whose wounds are 
bare to our eyes on the street. 

And that brings me to my concept of a God. God 
exists in us because of our bundle of social brother- 
acts. Contemplation and crying out and assertions of 
belief are in the main notices that we are substituting 
something for acts. Our God should be a thing dis¬ 
covered only in retrospect. We live, we fight, we know 
others, and, as Overstreet says, our God sins and 
fights at our shoulder. He may be a mean God or a 
fine one. He is limited in his stature by our service. 

I fear your God, because I think he is a product of 
the unreal and unhelpful, that he has a “ bad psycho¬ 
logical past,” that he is subtly egotistical, that he fills 
the vision and leaves no room for the simple and 
patient deeds of brotherhood, a heavenly contempla¬ 
tion taking the place of earthly deeds. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 131 

You feel that I quote too many minds and am 
hobbled by it. I delight just now in the companion¬ 
ship of men through their books. I am devoted to 
knowing the facts of the lives of other humans and 
the train of thought which their experiences have 
started. To read them is like talking to them. I sus¬ 
pect, even dread, the “original thinker’’ who knows 
little of the experiments and failures of the thinkers 
of other places and times. To me such a stand denies 
that promising thing, the evolution of human thought. 
I also turn from those who borrow, but neglect to tell 
their sources. I want my “simple boys and girls of 
Washington” to know that to-day is a day of honest 
science; that events have antecedents; that “luck” 
does not exist; that the world will improve only 
through thoughtful social effort, and that lives are 
happy only in that effort. And with it all there will be 
time for beauty and verse and color and music — far 
be it from me to shut these out of my own life or the 
lives of others. But they are instruments, not attri¬ 
butes. I am very glad you wrote. 

Sincerely yours, 

Carleton H. Parker. 


CHAPTER XIII 


In May we sold our loved hill nest in Berkeley and 
started north, stopping for a three months’ vacation 

— our first real vacation since we had been married 

— at Castle Crags, where, almost ten years before, we 
had spent the first five days of our honeymoon, before 
going into Southern Oregon. There, in a log-cabin 
among the pines, we passed unbelievably cherished 
days — work a-plenty, play a-plenty, and the family 
together day in, day out. There was one little extra 
trip he got in with the two sons, for which I am so 
thankful. The three of them went off with their sleep¬ 
ing-bags and rods for two days, leaving “the girls’’ 
behind. Each son caught his first trout with a fly. 
They put the fish, cleaned, in a cool sheltered spot, 
because they had to be carried home for me to see; 
and lo! a little bear came down in the night and ate 
the fish, in addition to licking the fat all off the 
frying-pan. 

Then, like a bolt from the blue, came the fateful 
telegram from Washington, D.C. — labor difficulties 
in construction-work at Camp Lewis — would he 
report there at once as Government Mediator. Oh! 
the Book, the Book — the Book that was to be fin¬ 
ished without fail before the new work at the Univer¬ 
sity of Washington began! Perhaps he would be back 
in a week! Surely he would be back in a week! So 
he packed just enough for a week, and off he went 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


*33 

One week! When, after four weeks, there was still 
no let up in his mediation duties, — in fact they in¬ 
creased, — I packed up the family and we left for 
Seattle. I had rewound his fishing-rod with orange silk, 
and had revarnished it, as a surprise for his home¬ 
coming to Castle Crags. He never fished with it again. 

How that man loved fishing! How he loved every 
sport, for that matter. And he loved them with the 
same thoroughness and allegiance that he gave to 
any cause near his heart. Baseball — he played on his 
high-school team (also he could recite “Casey at the 
Bat” with a gusto that many a friend of the earlier 
days will remember. And here I am reminded of his 
“Christopher Columnibus.” I recently ran across a 
postcard a college mate sent Carl from Italy years 
ago, with a picture of a statue of Columbus on it. On 
the reverse side the friend had written, quoting from 
Carl’s monologue: “ 4 Boom Joe!’ says the king; which 
is being interpreted, 4 1 see you first.’ ‘Wheat cakes,’ 
says Chris, which is the Egyptian for ‘Boom Joe’”). 
He loved football, track, — he won three gold medals 
broad-jumping, — canoeing, swimming, billiards,— 
he won a loving cup at that, — tennis, ice-skating, 
hand-ball; and yes, ye of finer calibre, quiver if you 
will — he loved a prize-fight and played a mighty 
good game of poker, as well as bridge — though in 
the ten and a half years that we were married I can¬ 
not remember that he played poker once or bridge 
more than five times. He did, however, enjoy his 
bridge with Simon Patton in Philadelphia; and when 
he played, he played well. 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


134 

I tell you there was hardly anything the man could 
not do. He could draw the funniest pictures you ever 
saw — I wish I could reproduce the letters he sent his 
sons from the East. He was a good carpenter — the 
joy it meant to his soul to add a second-hand tool ever 
so often to his collection! Sunday morning was special 
carpenter-time — new shelves here, a bookcase there, 
new steps up to the swimming-tank, etc. I have heard 
many a man say that he told a story better than any 
one they ever heard. He was an expert woodsman. 
And, my gracious! how he did love babies! That 
hardly fits in just here, but I think of it now. His love 
for children colored his whole economic viewpoint. 

“There is the thing that possessed Parker — the 
perception of the destructive significance of the re¬ 
pressed and balked instincts of the migratory worker, 
the unskilled, the casuals, the hoboes, the womanless, 
jobless, voteless men. To him their tragedy was akin 
to the tragedy of child-life in our commercialized 
cities. More often than of anything else, he used to 
talk to me of the fatuous blindness of a civilization 
that centred its economic activities in places where 
child-life was perpetually repressed and imperiled. 
The last time I saw him he was flaming indignation 
at the ghastly record of children killed and maimed 
by trucks and automobiles. What business had auto¬ 
mobiles where children should be free to play? What 
could be said for the human wisdom of a civilization 
that placed traffic above child-life? In our denial to 
children, to millions of men and women, of the means 
for satisfying their instinctive desires and innate dis* 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


135 

positions, he saw the principal explanation of crime, 
labor-unrest, the violence of strikes, the ghastly vio¬ 
lence of war.” 1 

He could never pass any youngster anywhere with¬ 
out a word of greeting as from friend to friend. I re¬ 
member being in a crowded car with him in our en¬ 
gaged days. He was sitting next to a woman with a 
baby who was most unhappy over the ways of the 
world. Carl asked if he could not hold the squaller. 
The mother looked a bit doubtful, but relinquished 
her child. Within two minutes the babe was content 
on Carl’s knees, clutching one of his fingers in a fat 
fist and sucking his watch. The woman leaned over 
to me later, as she was about to depart with a very 
sound asleep offspring. “ Is he as lovely as that to his 
own? ” 

The tenderness of him over his own! Any hour of 
the day or night he was alert to be of any service in 
any trouble, big or little. He had a collection of tricks 
and stories on hand for any youngster who happened 
along. The special pet of our own boys was “The 
Submarine Obo Bird” — a large flapper (Dad’s arms 
fairly rent the air), which was especially active early 
in the morning, when small boys appeared to prefer 
staying in bed to getting up. The Obo Bird went 
“Pak! Pak!” and lit on numerous objects about the 
sleeping porch. Carl’s two hands would plump stiff, 
fingers down, on the railing, or on a small screw stick¬ 
ing out somewhere. Scratches. Then “Pak!” and 
more flaps. This time the Obo Bird would light a trifle 

Robert Bru&re, in the New Republic , May 18, 1918. 


1 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


136 

nearer the small boy whose “turn” it was — round 
eyes, and an agitated grin from ear to ear, plus explo¬ 
sive giggles and gurglings emerging from the covers. 
Nearer and nearer came the Obo Bird. Gigglier and 
gigglier got the small boy. Finally, with a spring and 
a last “ Pak! Pak! Pak!” the Obo Bird dove under the 
covers at the side of the bed and pinched the small 
boy who would not get up. (Rather a premium on not 
rising promptly was the Obo Bird.) Final ecstatic 
squeals from the pinched. Then, “Now it’s my turn, 
daddo!” from the other son. — The Submarine Obo 
Bird lived in Alaska and ate Spooka biscuits. There 
was just developing a wee Obo Bird, that made less 
vehement “paks!” and pinched less agitatedly — a 
special June-Bug Obo Bird. In fact, the baby was not 
more than three months old when the boys demanded 
a Submarine Obo Bird that ate little Spooka biscuits 
for sister. 

His trip to Camp Lewis threw him at once into the 
midst of the lumber difficulties of the Northwest, 
which lasted for months. The big strike in the lumber 
industry was on when he arrived. He wrote: “It is a 
strike to better conditions. The I.W.W. are only the 
display feature. The main body of opinion is from 
a lot of unskilled workers who are sick of the filthy 
bunk-houses and rotten grub.” He wrote later of a 
conference with the big lumbermen, and of how they 
would not stay on the point but “roared over the 
I.W.W. I told them that condemnation was not a 
solution, or businesslike, but what we wanted was a 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


137 

statement of how they were to open their plants. More 
roars. More demands for troops, etc. I said I was a 
college man, not used to business; but if business men 
had as much trouble as this keeping to the real points 
involved, give me a faculty analysis. They laughed 
over this and got down to business, and in an hour 
lined up the affair in mighty good shape.” 

I wish it were proper to go into the details here of 
the various conferences, the telegrams sent to Wash¬ 
ington, the replies. Carl wrote: “I am saving all the 
copies for you, as it is most interesting history.” Each 
letter would end: “By three days at least I should 
start back. I am getting frantic to be home.” Home, 
for the Parkers, was always where we happened to be 
then. Castle Crags was as much “home” as any place 
had ever been. We had moved fourteen times in ten 
years: of the eleven Christmases we had had together, 
only two had been in the same place. There were 
times when “home” was a Pullman car. It made no 
difference. One of the strange new feelings I have to 
get used to is the way I now look at places to live in. 
It used to be that Carl and I, in passing the littlest 
bit of a hovel, would say, “We could be perfectly 
happy in a place like that, could n’t we? Nothing 
makes any difference if we are together.” But certain 
kinds of what we called “cuddly” houses used to 
make us catch our breaths, to think of the extra joy 
it would be living together tucked away in there. 
Now, when I pass a place that looks like that, I have 
to drop down some kind of a trap-door in my brain, 
and not think at all until I get well by it. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


» 3 8 

Labor conditions in the Northwest grew worse, 
strikes more general, and finally Carl wrote that he 
just must be indefinitely on the job. “ I am so home¬ 
sick for you that I feel like packing up and coming. 
I literally feel terribly. But with all this feeling I don’t 
see how I can. Not only have I been telegraphed to 
stay on the job, but the situation is growing steadily 
worse. Last night my proposal (eight-hour day, non¬ 
partisan complaint and adjustment board, suppres¬ 
sion of violence by the state) was turned down by the 
operators in Tacoma. President Suzzallo and I fought 
for six hours but it went down. The whole situation is 
drifting into a state of incipient sympathetic strikes.” 
Later: “This is the most bull-headed affair and I 
don’t think it is going to get anywhere.” Still later: 
“Things are not going wonderfully in our mediation. 
Employers demanding everything and men granting 
much but not that.” Again: “Each day brings a new 
crisis. Gee, labor is unrestful . . . and gee, the pig¬ 
headedness of bosses! Human nature is sure one hun¬ 
dred per cent psychology.” Also he wrote, referring 
to the general situation at the University and in the 
community: “Am getting absolutely crazy with en¬ 
thusiasm over my job here. ... It is too vigorous 
and resultful for words.” And again: “The mediation 
between employers and men blew up to-day at 4 p.m. 
and now a host of nice new strikes show on the hori¬ 
zon. . . . There are a lot of fine operators but some 
hard shells.” Again: “Gee, I’m learning! And talk 
about material for the Book!” 

An article appeared in one of the New York papers 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


l 39 

recently, entitled “ How Carle ton H. Parker Settled 
Strikes ”: — 

“It was under his leadership that, in less than a 
year, twenty-seven disputes which concerned Govern¬ 
ment work in the Pacific Northwest were settled, and 
it was his method to lay the basis for permanent re¬ 
lief as he went along. . . . 

“Parker’s contribution was in the method he used. 
. . . Labor leaders of all sorts would flock to him in 
a bitter, weltering mass, mouthing the set phrases 
of class-hatred they use so effectually in stirring up 
trouble. They would state their case. And Parker 
would quietly deduce the irritation points that seemed 
to stand out in the jumbled testimony. 

“Then it would be almost laughable to the observer 
to hear the employer’s side of the case. Invariably it 
was just as bitter, just as unreasoning, and just as 
violent, as the statement of their case by the workers. 
Parker would endeavor to find, in all this heap of 
words, the irritation points of the other side. 

“But when a study was finished, his diagnosis 
made, and his prescription of treatment completed, 
Parker always insisted in carrying it straight to the 
workers. And he did not just tell them results. He 
often took several hours, sometimes several meetings 
of several hours each. In these meetings he would go 
over every detail of his method, from start to finish, 
explaining, answering questions, meeting objections 
with reason. And he always won them over. But, of 
course, it must be said that he had a tremendously 
compelling personality that carried him far.” 


CHAPTER XIV 


At the end of August the little family was united 
again in Seattle. Almost the clearest picture of Carl 
I have is the eager look with which he scanned the 
people stepping out of our car at the station, and the 
beam that lit up his face as he spied us. There is a line 
in Dorothy Canfield’s “Bent Twig” that always ap¬ 
pealed to us. The mother and father were separated 
for a few days, to the utter anguish of the father 
especially, and he remarked, “It’s Hell to be happily 
married!” Every time we were ever separated we felt 
just that. 

In one of Carl’s letters from Seattle he had written: 
“The ‘Atlantic Monthly’ wants me to write an article 
on the I.W.W.!!” So the first piece of work he had to 
do after we got settled was that. We were tremen¬ 
dously excited, and never got over chuckling at some 
of the moss-grown people we knew about the country 
who would feel outraged at the “Atlantic Monthly” 
stooping to print stuff by that young radical. And on 
such a subject! How we tore at the end, to get the 
article off on time! The stenographer from the Uni¬ 
versity came about two one Sunday afternoon. I sat 
on the floor up in the guest-room and read the manu¬ 
script to her while she typed it off. Carl would rush 
down more copy from his study on the third floor. 
I’d go over it while Miss Van Doren went over what 
she had typed. Then the reading would begin again. 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


141 

We hated to stop for supper, all three of us were so 
excited to get the job done. It had to be at the main 
post-office that night by eleven, to arrive in Boston 
when promised. At ten-thirty it was in the envelope, 
three limp people tore for the car, we put Miss Van 
Doren on, — she was to mail the article on her way 
home, — and Carl and I, knowing this was an occa¬ 
sion for a treat if ever there was one, routed out a 
sleepy drug-store clerk and ate the remains of his 
Sunday ice-cream supply. 

I can never express how grateful I am that that 
article was written and published before Carl died. 
The influence of it ramified in many and the most 
unexpected directions. I am still hearing of it. We 
expected condemnation at the time. There probably 
was plenty of it, but only one condemner wrote. On 
the other hand, letters streamed in by the score from 
friends and strangers bearing the general message, 
“God bless you for it!” 

That article is particularly significant as showing 
his method of approach to the whole problem of 
the I.W.W., after some two years of psychological 
study. 

“The futility of much conventional American social 
analysis is due to its description of the given problem 
in terms of its relationship to some relatively unim¬ 
portant or artificial institution. Few of the current 
analyses of strikes or labor violence make use of the 
basic standards of human desire and intention which 
control these phenomena. A strike and its demands 
are usually praised as being law-abiding, or economi- 


1 4 2 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


cally bearable, or are condemned as being unlawful, 
or confiscatory. These four attributes of a strike are 
important only as incidental consequences. The habit 
of Americans thus to measure up social problems to 
the current, temporary, and more or less accidental 
scheme of traditions and legal institutions, long ago 
gave birth to our national belief that passing a new 
law or forcing obedience to an old one was a specific 
for any unrest. The current analysis of the I.W.W. 
and its activities is an example of this perverted and 
unscientific method. The I.W.W. analysis, which has 
given both satisfaction and a basis for treating the 
organization, runs as follows: the organization is un¬ 
lawful in its activity, un-American in its sabotage, 
unpatriotic in its relation to the flag, the government, 
and the war. The rest of the condemnation is a play 
upon these three attributes. So proper and so suffi¬ 
cient has this condemnatory analysis become, that it 
is a risky matter to approach the problem from an¬ 
other angle. But it is now so obvious that our internal 
affairs are out of gear, that any comprehensive scheme 
of national preparedness would demand that full and 
honest consideration be given to all forces determin¬ 
ing the degree of American unity, one force being this 
tabooed organization. 

“It would be best to announce here a more or less 
dogmatic hypothesis to which the writer will stead¬ 
fastly adhere: that human behavior results from the 
rather simple, arithmetical combination of the in¬ 
herited nature of man and the environment in which 
his maturing years are passed. Man will behave 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


H 3 


according to the hints for conduct which the accidents 
of his life have stamped into his memory mechanism. 
A slum produces a mind which has only slum incidents 
with which to work, and a spoiled and protected child 
seldom rises to aggressive competitive behavior, 
simply because its past life has stored up no memory 
imprints from which a predisposition to vigorous life 
can be built. The particular things called the moral 
attributes of man’s conduct are conventionally found 
by contrasting this educated and trained way of 
acting with the exigencies and social needs or dangers 
of the time. Hence, while his immoral or unpatriotic 
behavior may fully justify his government in im¬ 
prisoning or eliminating him when it stands in some 
particular danger which his conduct intensifies, this 
punishment in no way either explains his character 
or points to an enduring solution of his problem. 
Suppression, while very often justified and necessary 
in the flux of human relationship, always carries a 
social cost which must be liquidated, and also a back¬ 
fire danger which must be insured against. The human 
being is born with no innate proclivity to crime or 
special kind of unpatriotism. Crime and treason are 
habit-activities, educated into man by environ¬ 
mental influences favorable to their development. . . . 

“The I.W.W. can be profitably viewed only as a 
psychological by-product of the neglected childhood 
of industrial America. It is discouraging to see the 
problem to-day examined almost exclusively from the 
point of view of its relation to patriotism and con¬ 
ventional commercial morality. . . . 


144 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


“ It is perhaps of value to quote the language of the 
most influential of the I.W.W. leaders. 

“‘You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to 
the United States. If you were a bum without a 
blanket; if you left your wife and kids when you went 
West for a job, and had never located them since; if 
your job never kept you long enough in a place to 
qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunk- 
house, and ate food just as rotten as they could give 
you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your 
cooking-cans full of holes and spilled your grub on 
the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when 
the bosses thought they had you down; if there was 
one law for Ford, Suhr, and Mooney, and another for 
Harry Thaw; if every person who represented law and 
order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to 
jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told 
them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man 
to be patriotic? This war is a business man’s war and. 
we don’t see why we should go out and get shot in 
order to save the lovely state of affairs that we now 
enjoy.’ 

“The argument was rather difficult to keep pro¬ 
ductive, because gratitude — that material prerequi¬ 
site to patriotism — seemed wanting in their attitude 
toward the American government. Their state of 
mind could be explained only by referring it, as was 
earlier suggested, to its major relationships. The dom¬ 
inating concern of the I.W.W. is what Keller calls 
the maintenance problem. Their philosophy is, in its 
simple reduction, a stomach-philosophy, and their 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


H5 


politico-industrial revolt could be called without injus¬ 
tice a hunger-riot. But there is an important correc¬ 
tion to this simple statement. While their way of living 
has seriously encroached on the urgent minima of 
nutrition, shelter, clothing, and physical health, it has 
also long outraged the American laboring-class tra¬ 
ditions touching social life, sex-life, self-dignity, and 
ostentation. Had the food and shelter been sufficient, 
the revolt tendencies might have simmered out, were 
the migratory labor population not keenly sensitive 
to traditions of a richer psychological life than mere 
physical maintenance.’’ 

The temper of the country on this subject, the gen¬ 
eral closed attitude of mind which the average man 
holds thereon, prompt me to add here a few more of 
Carl’s generalizations and conclusions in this article. 
If only he were here, to cry aloud again and yet again 
on this point! Yet I know there are those who sense 
his approach, and are endeavoring in every way pos¬ 
sible to make wisdom prevail over prejudice. 

“ Cynical disloyalty and contempt of the flag must, 
in the light of modern psychology, come from a mind 
which is devoid of national gratitude, and in which 
the United States stirs no memory of satisfaction or 
happiness. To those of us who normally feel loyal to 
the nation, such a disloyal sentiment brings sharp 
indignation. As an index of our own sentiment and 
our own happy relations to the nation, this indigna¬ 
tion has value. As a stimulus to a programme or ethical 
generalization, it is the cause of vast inaccuracy and 
sad injustice. American syndicalism is not a scheming 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


146 

group dominated by an unconventional and destruc¬ 
tive social philosophy. It is merely a commonplace 
attitude — not such a state of mind as Machiavelli 
or Robespierre possessed, but one stamped by the 
lowest, most miserable labor-conditions and outlook 
which American industrialism produces. To those 
who have seen at first-hand the life of the western 
casual laborer, any reflections on his gratitude or 
spiritual buoyancy seem ironical humor. 

“An altogether unwarranted importance has been 
given to the syndicalist philosophy of the I.W.W. A 
few leaders use its phraseology. Of these few, not half 
a dozen know the meaning of French syndicalism or 
English guild socialism. To the great wandering rank 
and file, the I.W.W. is simply the only social break in 
the harsh search for work that they have ever had; 
its headquarters the only competitor of the saloon 
in which they are welcome. . . . 

“It is a conventional economic truism that Amer¬ 
ican industrialism is guaranteeing to some half of the 
forty millions of our industrial population a life of 
such limited happiness, of such restrictions on per¬ 
sonal development, and of such misery and desolation 
when sickness or accident comes, that we should be 
childish political scientists not to see that from such 
an environment little self-sacrificing love of country, 
little of ethics, little of gratitude could come. It is 
unfortunate that the scientific findings of our social 
condition must use words which sound strangely like 
the phraseology of the Socialists. This similarity, how¬ 
ever, should logically be embarrassing to the critics 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


H 7 

of these findings, not to the scientists. Those who 
have investigated and studied the lower strata of 
American labor have long recognized the I.W.W. as 
purely a symptom of a certain distressing state of 
affairs. The casual migratory laborers are the finished 
product of an economic environment which seems cru¬ 
elly efficient in turning out human beings modeled 
after all the standards which society abhors. The his¬ 
tory of the migratory workers shows that, starting 
with the long hours and dreary winters on the farms 
they ran away from, or the sour-smelling bunk-house 
in a coal village, through their character-debasing 
experience with the drifting ‘hire and fire’ life in the 
industries, on to the vicious social and economic life 
of the winter unemployed, their training predeter¬ 
mined but one outcome, and the environment pro¬ 
duced its type. 

“The I.W.W. has importance only as an illustra¬ 
tion of a stable American economic process. Its pitiful 
syndicalism, its street-corner opposition to the war, 
are the inconsequential trimmings. Its strike alone, 
faithful as it is to the American type, is an illuminat¬ 
ing thing. The I.W.W., like the Grangers, the Knights 
of Labor, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Progressive 
Party, is but a phenomenon of revolt. The cure lies 
in taking care of its psychic antecedents; the sta¬ 
bility of our Republic depends on the degree of cour¬ 
age and wisdom with which we move to the task.” 

In this same connection I quote from another 
article: — 

“No one doubts the full propriety of the govern- 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


148 

ment’s suppressing ruthlessly any interference of the 
I.W.W. with war-preparation. All patriots should 
just as vehemently protest against all suppression of 
the normal protest activities of the I.W.W. There 
will be neither permanent peace nor prosperity in our 
country till the revolt basis of the I.W.W. is removed. 
And until that is done, the I.W.W. remains an un¬ 
fortunate, valuable symptom of a diseased indus¬ 
trialism.” 

I watch, along with many others, the growth of 
bitterness and hysteria in the treatment of labor 
spreading throughout our country, and I long, with 
many others, for Carl, with his depth and sanity of 
understanding, coupled with his passion for justice 
and democracy, to be somewhere in a position of 
guidance for these troublous times. 

I am reminded here of a little incident that took 
place just at this time. An I.W.W. was to come out 
to have dinner with us — some other friends, faculty 
people, also were to be there. About noon the tele¬ 
phone rang. Carl went. A rich Irish brogue announced: 

“ R-can’t come to your party to-night.” ‘‘ Why is 

that?” “He’s pinched. An’ he wants t’ know can he 
have your Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ to read 
while he’s in jail.” 



CHAPTER XV 


I am forever grateful that Carl had his experience at 
the University of Washington before he died. He left 
the University of California a young Assistant Pro¬ 
fessor, just one rebellious morsel in a huge machine. 
He found himself in Washington, not only Head of 
the Department of Economics and Dean of the Col¬ 
lege of Commerce, and a power on the campus, but a 
power in the community as well. He was working 
under a President who backed him in everything to 
the last ditch, who was keenly interested in every 
ambition he had for making a big thing of his work. 
He at last could see Introductory Economics given as 
he wanted to have it given — realizing at the same 
time that his plans were in the nature of an experi¬ 
ment. The two textbooks used in the first semester 
were McDougall’s “Social Psychology” and Wallas’s 
“Great Society.” During part of the time he pinned 
the front page of the morning paper on the board, 
and illustrated his subject-matter by an item of news 
of that very day. 

His theory of education was that the first step in 
any subject was to awaken a keen interest and curi¬ 
osity in the student; for that reason he felt that pure 
theory in Economics was too difficult for any but 
seniors or graduates; that, given too soon, it tended 
only to discourage. He allowed no note-taking in any 
of his courses, insisted on discussion by the class, no 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


150 

matter how large it was, planned to do away with 
written examinations as a test of scholarship, sub¬ 
stituting instead a short oral discussion with each 
student individually, grading them “passed’’ and 
“not passed.” As it was, because of the pressure of 
Government work, he had to resort to written tests. 
The proportion of first sections in the final examina¬ 
tion, which was difficult, was so large that Carl was 
sure the reader must have marked too leniently, and 
looked over the papers himself. His results were the 
same as the reader’s, and, he felt, could justifiably be 
used as some proof of his theory that, if a student is 
interested in the subject, you cannot keep him from 
doing good work. 

I quote here from two letters written by Washing¬ 
ton students who had been under his influence but 
five months. 

“May I, as only a student, add my inadequate 
sympathy for the loss of Dr. Parker — the most lib¬ 
eral man I have known. While his going from my edu¬ 
cative life can be nothing as compared to his loss from 
a very beautiful family group, yet the enthusiasm, 
the radiance of his personality — freely given in his 
classes during the semester I was privileged to know 
him — made possible to me a greater realization of 
the fascination of humanity than I obtained during 
my previous four years of college study. I still look 
for him to enter the classroom, nor shall I soon forget 
his ideals, his faith in humanity.” From the second 
letter: “To have known Mr. Parker as well as I did 
makes me feel that I was indeed privileged, and I shall 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


151 

always carry with me the charm and inspiration of 
his glorious personality. The campus was never so 
sad as on the day which brought the news of his 
death — it seemed almost incredible that one man in 
five short months could have left so indelible an 
impress of his character on the student body.” 

Besides being of real influence on the campus, he 
had the respect and confidence of the business world, 
both labor and capital; and in addition, he stood as 
the representative of the Government in labor-adjust¬ 
ments and disputes. And — it was of lesser conse¬ 
quence, but oh it did matter — we had money enough 
to live on!! We had made ourselves honestly think 
that we had just about everything we wanted on 
what we got, plus outside lectures, in California. But 
once we had tasted of the new-found freedom of truly 
enough; once there was gone forever the stirring 
around to pick up a few extra dollars here and there 
to make both ends meet; once we knew for the first 
time the satisfaction and added joy that come from 
some responsible person to help with the housework 
— we felt that we were soaring through life with our 
feet hardly touching the ground. 

Instead of my spending most of the day in the 
kitchen and riding herd on the young, we had our 
dropped-straight-from-heaven Mrs. Willard. And see 
what that meant. Every morning at nine I left the 
house with Carl, and we walked together to the 
University. As I think of those daily walks now, arm- 
in-arm, rain or shine, I’d not give up the memory of 
them for all creation. Carl would go over what he 



1 5 2 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


was to talk about that morning in Introductory Eco¬ 
nomics (how it would have raised the hair of the or¬ 
thodox Econ.I teacher!), and of course we always 
talked some of what marvelous children we possessed. 
Carl would begin: ‘‘Tell me some more about the 
June-Bug!” 

He would go to his nine o’clock, I to mine. After 
my ten-o’clock class, and on the way to my eleven- 
o’clock lecture, I always ran in to his office a second, 
to gossip over what mail he had got that morning 
and how things were going generally. Then, at twelve, 
in his office again. “Look at this telegram that just 

came in.” “How shall I answer Mr.-’s about that 

job?” And then home together; not once a week, but 
every day. 

Afternoons, except the three afternoons when I 
played hockey, I was at home; but always there was 
a possibility that Carl would ring up about five. “I 
am at a meeting down-town. Can’t get things settled, 
so we continue this evening. Run down and have sup¬ 
per with me, and perhaps, who knows, a Bill Hart 
film might be around town!” There was Mrs. Willard 
who knew just what to do, and off I could fly to see 
my husband. You can’t, on $1700 a year. 

I hear people nowadays scold and roar over the 
pay the working classes are getting, and how they 
are spending it all on nonsense and not saving a cent. 
I stand it as long as I can and then I burst out. For 
I, too, have tasted the joy of at last being able to get 
things we never thought we would own and of feeling 
the wings of financial freedom feather out where, be- 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


*53 

fore, all had been cold calculation: Can we do this? 
if so, what must we give up? I wish every one on earth 
could feel it. I do not care if they do not save a cent. 

Only I do wish my Carl could have experienced 
those joys a little longer. It was so good — so good, 
while it lasted! And it was only just starting. Every 
new call he got to another university was at a salary 
from one to two thousand dollars more than what we 
were getting, even at Seattle. It looked as if our days 
of financial scrimping were gone forever. We even 
discussed a Ford! nay — even a four-cylinder Buick! 
And every other Sunday we had fricasseed chicken, 
and always, always a frosting on the cake. For the 
first two months in Seattle we felt as if we ought to 
have company at every meal. It did not seem right 
to sit down to food as good as that, with just the 
family present. And it was such fun to bring home 
unexpected guests, and to know that Mrs. Willard 
could concoct a dream of a dish while the guests were 
removing their hats; and I not having to miss any of 
the conversation from being in the kitchen. Every 
other Sunday night we had the whole Department 
and their wives to Sunday supper — sixteen of them. 
Oh dear, oh dear, money does make a difference. We 
grew more determined than ever to see that more 
folk in the world got more of it. 

And yet, in a sense, Carl was a typical professor in 
his unconcern over matters financial. He started in 
the first month we were married by turning over 
every cent to me as a matter of course; and from the 
beginning of each month to the end, he never had the 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


154 

remotest idea how much money we possessed or what 
it was spent for. So far as his peace of mind went, on 
the whole, he was a capitalist. He knew we needed 
more money than he was making at the University of 
California, therefore he made all he could on the out¬ 
side, and came home and dumped it in my lap. From 
one year’s end to the next, he spent hardly five cents 
on himself — a new suit now and then, a new hat, 
new shirts at a sale, but never a penny that was not 
essential. 

On the rest of us — there he needed a curbing hand! 
I discovered him negotiating to buy me a set of jade 
when he was getting one hundred dollars a month. 
He would bring home a box of peaches or a tray of 
berries, when they were first in the market and eaten 
only by bank presidents and railway magnates, and 
beam and say, “Guess what surprise I have for you!” 
Nothing hurt his feelings more than to have him sug¬ 
gest I should buy something for myself, and have me 
answer that we could not afford it. “Then I’ll dig 
sewers on the side!” he would exclaim. “You buy it, 
and I’ll find the money for it somewhere.” If he had 
turned off at an angle of fifty degrees when he first 
started his earthly career, he would have been a star 
example of the individual who presses the palms of his 
hands together and murmurs, “The Lord will pro¬ 
vide!” 

I never knew a man who was so far removed from 
the traditional ideas of the proper position of the male 
head of a household. He felt, as I have said, that he 
was not the one to have control over finances — that 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


155 


was the wife’s province. Then he had another attitude 
which certainly did not jibe with the Lord-of-the- 
Manor idea. Perhaps there would be something I 
wanted to do, and I would wait to ask him about it 
when he got home. Invariably the same thing would 
happen. He would take my two hands and put them 
so that I held his coat-lapels. Then he would place his 
hands on my shoulders, beam all over, eyes twinkling, 
and say: — 

“Who’s boss of this household, anyway?” 

And I had to answer, ”1 am.” 

“Who gets her own way one hundred per cent?” 

“I do.” 

“Who never gets his own way and never wants to 
get his own way?” 

“You.” 

“Well, then, you know perfectly well you are to do 
anything in this world you want to do.” With a 
chuckle he would add, “Think of it — not a look-in 
in my own home!” 

Seattle, as I look back on it, meant the unexpected 
— in every way. Our little sprees together were not 
the planned-out ones of former years. From the day 
Carl left Castle Crags, his time was never his own; we 
could never count on anything from one day to the 
next — a strike here, an arbitration there, govern¬ 
ment orders for this, some investigation needed for 
that. It was harassing, it was wearying. But always 
every few days there would be that telephone ring 
which I grew both to dread and to love. For as often 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


156 

as it said, “I’ve got to go to Tacoma,” it also said, 
“You Girl, put on your hat and coat this minute and 
come down town while I have a few minutes off 
— we’ll have supper together anyhow.” 

And the feeling of the courting days never left us — 
that almost sharp joy of being together again when 
we just locked arms for a block and said almost noth¬ 
ing — nothing to repeat. And the good-bye that 
always meant a wrench, always, though it might mean 
being together within a few hours. And always the 
waving from the one on the back of the car to the 
one standing on the corner. Nothing, nothing, ever 
got tame. After ten years, if Carl ever found himself 
a little early to catch the train for Tacoma, say, 
though he had said good-bye but a half an hour before 
and was to be back that evening, he would find a 
telephone-booth and ring up to say, perhaps, that he 
was glad he had married me! Mrs. Willard once said 
that after hearing Carl or me talk to. the other over 
the telephone, it made other husbands and wives 
when they telephoned sound as if they must be con¬ 
templating divorce. But telephoning was an event: 
it was a little extra present from Providence, as it 
were. 

And I think of two times when we met acciden¬ 
tally on the street in Seattle — it seemed something 
we could hardly believe: all the world — the war, 
commerce, industry — stopped while we tried to 
realize what had happened. 

Then, every night that he had to be out, — and he 
had to be out night after night in Seattle, — I would 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


l S7 

hear his footstep coming down the street; it would 
wake me, though he wore rubber heels. He would fix 
the catch on the front-door lock, then come upstairs, 
calling out softly, “You awake?” He always knew! 
was. Then, sitting on the edge of the bed, he would 
tell all the happenings since I had seen him last. 
Once in a while he’d sigh and say, “A little ranch up 
on the Clearwater would go pretty well about now, 
wouldn’t it, my girl?” And I would sigh, and say, 
“Oh dear, would n’t it?” 

I remember once, when we were first married, he 
got home one afternoon before I did. When I opened 
the door to our little Seattle apartment, there he was, 
walking the floor, looking as if the bottom had dropped 
out of the universe. “I’ve had the most awful twenty 
minutes,” he informed me, “simply terrible. Promise 
me absolutely that never, never will you let me get 
home before you do. To expect to find you home and 
then open the door into empty rooms — oh, I never 
lived through such a twenty minutes!” We had a 
lark’s whistle that we had used since before our en¬ 
gaged days. Carl would whistle it under my window 
at the Theta house in college, and I would run down 
and out the side door, to the utter disgust of my well- 
bred “sisters,” who arranged to make cutting re¬ 
marks at the table about it in the hope that I would 
reform my “servant-girl tactics.” That whistle was 
whistled through those early Seattle days, through 
Oakland, through Cambridge, Leipzig, Berlin, Heidel¬ 
berg, Munich, Swanage, Berkeley, Alamo in the 
country, Berkeley again (he would start it way down 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


158 

the hill so I could surely hear), Castle Crags, and 
Seattle. Wherever any of us were in the house, it 
meant a dash for all to the front door — to welcome 
the Dad home. 

One evening I was scanning some article on mar¬ 
riage by the fire in Seattle — it was one of those rare 
times that Carl too was at home and going over lec¬ 
tures for the next day. It held that, to be successful, 
marriage had to be an adjustment — a giving in here 
by the man, there by the woman. 

I said to Carl: “ If that is true, you must have been 
doing all the adjusting; I never have had to give up, 
or fit in, or relinquish one little thing, so you’ve been 
doing it all.” 

He thought for a moment, then answered: “You 
know, I’ve heard that too, and wondered about it. 
For I know I’ve given up nothing, made no ‘adjust¬ 
ments.’ On the contrary, I seem always to have 
been getting more than a human being had any right 
to count on.” 

It was that way, even to the merest details, such 
as both liking identically the same things to eat, sea¬ 
soned the identical way. We both liked to do the iden¬ 
tical things, without a single exception. Perhaps one 
exception — he had a fondness in his heart for fire¬ 
arms that I could not share. (The gleam in his eyes 
when he got out his collection every so often to clean 
and oil it!) I liked guns, provided I did not have to 
shoot at anything alive with them; but pistols I just 
plain did not like at all. We rarely could pass one of 
these shooting-galleries without trying our luck at 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 159 

five cents for so many turns — at clay pigeons or rab¬ 
bits whirling around on whatnots; but that was as 
wild as I ever wanted to get with a gun. 

We liked the same friends without exception, the 
same books, the same pictures, the same music. He 
wrote once: “ We (the two of us) love each other, like 
to do things together (absolutely anything), don’t need 
or want anybody else, and the world is ours.” Mrs. 
Willard once told me that if she had read about our 
life together in a book, she would not have believed 
it. She did not know that any one on earth could live 
like that. Perhaps that is one reason why I want to 
tell about it — because it was just so plain wonder¬ 
ful day in, day out. I feel, too, that I have a complete 
record of our life. For fourteen years, every day that 
we were not together we wrote to each other, with the 
exception of two short camping-trips that Carl made, 
where mail could be sent out only by chance returning 
campers. 

Somehow I find myself thinking here of our wed¬ 
ding anniversaries, — spread over half the globe, — 
and the joy we got out of just those ten occasions. 
The first one was back in Oakland, after our return 
from Seattle. We still had elements of convention left 
in us then, — or, rather, I still had some; I don’t be¬ 
lieve Carl had a streak of it in him ever, — so we 
dressed in our very best clothes, dress-suit and all, 
and had dinner at the Key Route Inn, where we had 
gone after the wedding a year before. After dinner we 
rushed home, I nursed the son, we changed into nat¬ 
ural clothes, and went to the circus. I had misgivings 


i6o AN AMERICAN IDYLL 

about the circus being a fitting wedding-anniversary 
celebration; but what was one to do when the circus 
comes to town but one night in the year? 

The second anniversary was in Cambridge. We al¬ 
ways used to laugh each year and say: '‘Gracious! 
if any one had told us a year ago we’d be here this 
September seventh! ’ ’ Every year we were somewhere 
we never dreamed we would be. That first September 
seventh, the night of the wedding, we were to be in 
Seattle for years — selling bonds. What a fearful 
prospect in retrospect, compared to what we really 
did! The second September, back in Oakland, we 
thought we were to be in the bond business for years 
in Oakland. More horrible thoughts as I look back 
upon it. The third September seventh, the second 
anniversary, lo and behold, was in Cambridge, Massa¬ 
chusetts! Whoever would have guessed it, in all the 
world? It was three days after Carl’s return from 
that awful Freiburg summer — we left Nandy with 
a kind-hearted neighbor, and away we spreed to Bos¬ 
ton, to the matinee and something good to eat. 

Then, whoever would have imagined for a moment 
that the next year we would be celebrating in Berlin 
— dinner at the Cafe Rheingold, with wine! The 
fourth anniversary was at Heidelberg — one of the 
red-letter days, as I look back upon those magic 
years. We left home early, with our lunch, which we 
ate on a bed of dry leaves in a fairy birch forest back 
•—and a good ways up — in the Odenwald. Then 
we walked and walked — almost twenty-five miles 
all told — through little forest hamlets, stopping now 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


161 


and then at some small inn along the roadside for a 
cheese sandwich or a glass of beer. By nightfall we 
reached Neckarsteinach and the railroad, and prowled 
around the twisted narrow streets till train-time, gaz¬ 
ing often at our beloved Dilsberg crowning the hilltop 
across the river, her ancient castle tower and town 
walls showing black against the starlight. The happi¬ 
ness, the foreign untouristed wonder of that day! 

Our fifth anniversary was another red-letter day —• 
one of the days that always made me feel, in looking 
back on it, that we must have been people in a novel, 
an English novel; that it could not really have been 
Carl and I who walked that perfect Saturday from 
Swanage to Studland. But it was our own two joyous 
souls who explored that quaint English thatched-roof, 
moss-covered corner of creation; who poked about 
the wee old mouldy church and cemetery; who had 
tea and muffins and jam out under an old gnarled 
apple tree behind a thatched-roof cottage. What a 
wonder of a day it was! And indeed it was my Carl 
and I who walked the few miles home toward sunset, 
swinging hands along the downs, and fairly speechless 
with the glory of five years married and England 
and our love. I should like to be thinking of that day 
just before I die. It was so utterly perfect, and so 
ours. 

Our sixth anniversary was another, yes, yet another 
red-letter memory — one of those times that the 
world seemed to have been leading up to since it first 
cooled down. We left our robust sons in the care of 
our beloved aunt, Elsie Turner, — this was back in 


162 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


Berkeley, — and one Saturday we fared forth, plus 
sleeping-bags, frying-pan, fishing-rod, and a rifle. We 
rode to the end of the Ocean Shore Line — but first 
got off the train at Half Moon Bay, bought half a 
dozen eggs from a lonely-looking female, made for the 
beach, and fried said eggs for supper. Then we got 
back on another train, and stepped off at the end of 
the line, in utter darkness. We decided that some¬ 
where we should find a suitable wooded nook where 
we could sequester ourselves for the night. We stum¬ 
bled along until we could not see another inch in front 
of us for the dark and the thick fog; so made camp 
— which meant spreading out two bags — in what 
looked like as auspicious a spot as was findable. When 
we opened our eyes to the morning sunlight, we dis¬ 
covered we were on a perfectly barren open ploughed 
piece of land, and had slept so near the road that if a 
machine passing along in the night had skidded out a 
bit to the side, it would have removed our feet. 

That day, Sunday, was our anniversary, and the 
Lord was with us early and late, though not obtru¬ 
sively. We got a farmer out of bed to buy some eggs 
for our breakfast. He wanted to know what we were 
doing out so early, anyhow. We told him, celebrating 
our sixth wedding anniversary. Whereat he positively 
refused to take a cent for the eggs — wedding pres¬ 
ent, he said. Around noon we passed a hunter, who 
stopped to chat, and ended by presenting us with a 
cotton-tail rabbit to cook for dinner. And such a din¬ 
ner! — by a bit of a stream up in the hills. That after¬ 
noon, late, we stumbled on a deserted farmhouse 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


163 

almost at the summit — trees laden with apples and 
the ground red with them, pears and a few peaches 
for the picking, and a spring of ice-cold water with 
one lost fat trout in it that I tried for hours to catch 
by fair means or foul; but he merely waved his tail 
slowly, as if to say, “One wedding present you don’t 
get!” We slept that night on some hay left in an old 
barn —- lots of mice and gnawy things about; but I 
could not get nearly as angry at a gnawy mouse as 
at a fat conceited trout who refused to be caught. 

Next day was a holiday, so we kept on our way 
rejoicing, and slept that night under great redwoods, 
beside a stream where trout had better manners. 
After a fish breakfast we potted a tin can full of holes 
with the rifle, and then bore down circuitously and 
regretfully on Redwood City and the Southern Pacific 
Railway, and home and college and dishes to wash and 
socks to darn — but uproarious and joyful sons to 
compensate. 

The seventh anniversary was less exciting, but that 
could not be helped. We were over in Alamo, with my 
father, small brother, and sister visiting us at the time 
— or rather, of course, the place was theirs to begin 
with. There was no one to leave the blessed sons 
with; also, Carl was working for the Immigration and 
Housing Commission, and no holidays. But he man¬ 
aged to get home a bit early; we had an early supper, 
got the sons in bed, hitched up the old horse to the 
old cart, and off we fared in the moonlight, married 
seven years and not sorry. We just poked about, end¬ 
ing at Danville with Danville ice-cream and Danville 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


164 

pumpkin pie; then walked the horse all the way back 
to Alamo and home. 

Our eighth anniversary, as mentioned, was in our 
very own home in Berkeley, with the curtains drawn, 
the telephone plugged, and our Europe spread out 
before our eyes. 

The ninth anniversary was still too soon after the 
June-Bug’s arrival for me to get off the hill and back, 
up our two hundred and seventeen steps home, so 
we celebrated under our own roof again — this time 
with a roast chicken and ice-cream dinner, and with 
the entire family participating — except the June-Bug, 
who did almost nothing then but sleep. I tell you, if 
ever we had chicken, the bones were not worth sal¬ 
vaging by the time we got through. We made it last 
at least two meals, and a starving tom cat would pass 
by what was left with a scornful sniff. 

Our tenth and last anniversary was in Seattle. 
Carl had to be at Camp Lewis all day, but he got 
back in time to meet me at six-thirty in the lobby of 
the Hotel Washington. From there we went to our 
own favorite place — Blanc’s — for dinner. Shut 
away behind a green lattice arbor-effect, we celebrated 
ten years of joy and riches and deep contentment, 
and as usual asked ourselves, “What in the world 
shall we be doing a year from now? Where in the world 
shall we be?” And as usual we answered, “Bring the 
future what it may, we have ten years that no power 
in heaven or earth can rob us of!” 

There was another occasion in our lives that I want 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


165 

to put down in black and white, though it does not 
come under wedding anniversaries. But it was such a 
celebration! “Uncle Max” ’lowed that before we left 
Berkeley we must go off on a spree with him, and 
suggested — imagine! — Del Monte! The twelve- 
and-a-half-cent Parkers at Del Monte! That was one 
spot we had never seen ourselves even riding by. We 
got our beloved Nurse Balch out to stay with the 
young, and when a brand-new green Pierce Arrow, 
about the size of our whole living-room, honked 
without, we were ready, bag and baggage, for a spree 
such as we had never imagined ourselves having in 
this world or the next. We called for the daughter of 
the head of the Philosophy Department. Max had 
said to bring a friend along to make four; so, four, we 
whisked the dust of Berkeley from our wheels and —* 
presto — Del Monte! 

Parents of three children, who do most of their own 
work besides, do not need to be told in detail what 
those four days meant. Parents of three children 
know what the hours of, say, seven to nine mean, at 
home; nor does work stop at nine. It is one mad whirl 
to get the family ears washed and teeth cleaned, and 
“Chew your mush!’’ and “Wipe your mouth!” and 
“Where’s your speller?” and “Jim, come back here 
and put on your rubbers! ” (“ Where are my rubbers ? ’ ’ 
Ach Gott! where?) Try six times to get the butcher — 
line busy. Breakfast dishes to clear up; baby to bathe, 
dress, feed. Count the laundry. Forget all about the 
butcher until fifteen minutes before dinner. Laundry 
calls. Telephone rings seven times. Neighbor calls to 




i66 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


borrow an egg. Telephone the milkman for a pound 
of butter. Make the beds, — telephone rings in the 
middle, — two beds do not get made till three. Start 
lunch. Wash the baby’s clothes. Telephone rings three 
times while you are in the basement. Rice burns. 
Door-bell — gas and electric bill. Telephone rings. 
Patch boys’ overalls. Water-bill. Stir the pudding. 
Telephone rings. Try to read at least the table of 
contents of the “ New Republic. ” Neighbor calls to re¬ 
turn some flour. Stir the pudding again. Mad stamp¬ 
ing up the front steps. Sons home. Forget to scrape 
their feet. Forget to take off their rubbers. Dad’s 
whistle. Hurray! Lunch.— Let’s stop about here, 
and return to Del Monte. 

This is where music would help. The Home motif 
would be — I do not know those musical terms, but 
a lot of jumpy notes up and down the piano, fast and 
never catching up. Del Monte motif slow, lazy melody 
— ending with dance-music for night-time. In plain 
English, what Del Monte meant was a care-free, 
absolutely care-free, jaunt into another world. It was 
not our world, — we could have been happy forever 
did we never lay eyes on Del Monte, — and yet, oh, 
it was such fun! Think of lazing in bed till eight or 
eight-thirty, then taking a leisurely bath, then dress¬ 
ing and deliberately using up time doing it — put 
one shoe on and look at it a spell; then, when you are 
good and ready, put on the next. Just feeling sort 
of spunky about it — just wanting to show some one 
that time is nothing to you — what’s the hurry? 

Then — oh, what motif in music could do a Del 





AN AMERICAN IDYLL 167 

Monte breakfast justice? Just yesterday you were 
gulping down a bite, in between getting the family 
fed and off. Here you were, holding hands under the 
table to make sure you were not dreaming, while you 
took minutes and minutes to eat fruit and mush and 
eggs and coffee and waffles, and groaned to think 
there was still so much on the menu that would cost 
you nothing to keep on consuming, but where, oh, 
where, put it? After rocking a spell in the sun on the 
front porch, the green Pierce Arrow appears, and all 
honk off for the day — four boxes of picnic lunch 
stowed away by a gracious waiter; not a piece of 
bread for it did you have to spread yourself. Basking 
in the sun under cypress trees, talking over every sub¬ 
ject under heaven; back in time for a swim, a rest 
before dinner; then dinner (why, oh, why has the 
human such biological limitations?). Then a concert, 
then dancing, then — crowning glory of an unlimited 
bank-account — Napa soda lemonade — and bed. 
Oh, what a four days! 

In thinking over the intimate things of our life 
together, I have difficulty in deciding what the finest 
features of it were. There was so much that made it 
rich, so much to make me realize I was blessed beyond 
any one else, that I am indebted to the world forever 
for the color that living with Carl Parker gave to 
existence. Perhaps one of the most helpful memories 
to me now is the thought of his absolute faith in me. 
From the time we were first in love, it meant a new 
zest in life to know that Carl firmly believed there 
was nothing I could not do. For all that I hold no 



i68 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


orthodox belief in immortality, I could no more get 
away from the idea that, if I fail in anything now — 
why I can't fail — think of Carl’s faith in me! About 
four days before he died, he looked up at me once as 
I was arranging his pillow and said, so seriously, “You 
know, there is n’t a university in the country that 
would n’t give you your Ph.D. without your taking 
an examination for it.” He was delirious, it is true; 
but nevertheless it expressed, though indeed in a very 
exaggerated form, the way he had of thinking I was 
somebody! I knew there was no one in the world like 
him, but I had sound reasons for that. Oh, but it is 
wonderful to live with some one who thinks you are 
wonderful! It does not make you conceited, not a bit, 
but it makes a happy singing feeling in your heart to 
feel that the one you love best in the world is proud of 
you. And there is always the incentive of vowing that 
some day you will justify it all. 

The fun of dressing for a party in a hand-me-down 
dress from some relative, knowing that the one you 
want most to please will honestly believe, and say on 
the way home, that you were the best-looking one at 
the party! The fun of cooking for a man who thinks 
every dish set before him is the best food he ever ate — 
and not only say it, but act that way. (“That was 
just a sample. Give me a real dish of it, now that I 
know it’s the best pudding I ever tasted!”) 


CHAPTER XVI 


As soon as the I.W.W. article was done, Carl had to 
begin on his paper to be read before the Economic 
Association, just after Christmas, in Philadelphia. 
That was fun working over. “Come up here and let 
me read you this!” And we’d go over that much of 
the paper together. Then more reading to Miss Van 
Doren, more correctings, finally finishing it just the 
day before he had to leave. But that was partly be¬ 
cause he had to leave earlier than expected. The 
Government had telegraphed him to go on to Wash¬ 
ington, to mediate a threatened longshoremen’s 
strike. Carl worked harder over the longshoremen 
than over any other single labor difficulty, not except¬ 
ing the eight-hour day in lumber. Here again I do not 
feel free to go into details. The matter was finally, 
at Carl’s suggestion, taken to Washington. 

The longshoremen interested Carl for the same 
reason that the migratory and the I.W.W. interested 
him; in fact, there were many I.W.W. among them. 
It was the lower stratum of the labor-world — hard 
physical labor, irregular work, and, on the whole, un¬ 
dignified treatment by the men set over them. And 
they reacted as Carl expected men in such a position 
to react. Yet, on the side of the workers, he felt that 
in this particular instance it was a case of men being 
led by stubborn egotistical union delegates not really 
representing the wishes of the rank and file of union 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


170 

members, their main idea being to compromise on 
nothing. On the other hand, be it said that he con¬ 
sidered the employers he had to deal with here the 
fairest, most open-minded, most anxious to compro¬ 
mise in the name of justice, of all the groups of em¬ 
ployers he ever had to deal with. The whole affair was 
nerve-racking, as is best illustrated by the fact that, 
while Carl was able to hold the peace as long as he 
was on the job, three days after his death the situa¬ 
tion “blew up.” 

On his way East he stopped off in Spokane, to talk 
with the lumbermen east of the mountains. There, at 
a big meeting, he was able to put over the eight-hour 
day. The Wilson Mediation Commission was in Seattle 
at the time. Felix Frankfurter telephoned out his 
congratulations to me, and said: “We consider it 
the single greatest achievement of its kind since the 
United States entered the war.” The papers were full 
of it and excitement ran high. President Wilson was 
telegraphed to by the Labor Commission, and he in 
turn telegraphed back his pleasure. In addition, the 
East Coast lumbermen agreed to Carl’s scheme of an 
employment manager for their industry, and detailed 
him to find a man for the job while in the East. My, 
but I was excited! 

Not only that, but they bade fair to let him in¬ 
augurate a system which would come nearer than 
any chance he could have expected to try out on a 
big scale his theories on the proper handling of labor. 
The men were to have the sanest recreation devisable 
for their needs and interests — out-of-door sports, 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


171 

movies, housing that would permit of dignified family 
life, recreation centres, good and proper food, altera¬ 
tion in the old order of “hire and fire,” and general 
control over the men. Most employers argued: “ Don’t 
forget that the type of men we have in the lumber 
camps won’t know how to make use of a single reform 
you suggest, and probably won’t give a straw for the 
whole thing.” To which Carl would reply: “Don’t 
forget that your old conditions have drawn the type 
of man you have. This won’t change men over-night 
by a long shot, but it will at once relieve the tension 
— and see, in five years, if your type itself has not 
undergone a change.” 

From Washington, D.C., he wrote: “This city is 
one mad mess of men, desolate, and hunting for folks 
they should see, overcharged by hotels, and away 
from their wives.” The red-letter event of Washing¬ 
ton was when he was taken for tea to Justice Bran- 
deis’s. “We talked I.W.W., unemployment, etc., and 
he was oh, so grand!” A few days later, two days 
before Christmas, Mrs. Brandeis telephoned and 
asked him for Christmas dinner! That was a great 
event in the Parker annals — Justice Brandeis hav¬ 
ing been a hero among us for some years. Carl 
wrote: “He is all he is supposed to be and more.” 
He in turn wrote me after Carl’s death: “Our country 
shares with you the great loss. Your husband was 
among the very few Americans who possessed the 
character, knowledge, and insight which are indispen¬ 
sable in dealing effectively with our labor-problem. 
Appreciation of his value was coming rapidly, and 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


172 

events were enforcing his teachings. His journey to 
the East brought inspiration to many; and I seek 
comfort in the thought that, among the students at 
the University, there will be some at least who are 
eager to carry forward his work.” 

There were sessions with Gompers, Meyer Bloom¬ 
field, Secretary Baker, Secretary Daniels, the Ship¬ 
ping Board, and many others. 

Then, at Philadelphia, came the most telling single 
event of our economic lives — Carl’s paper before 
the Economic Association on “ Motives in Economic 
Life.” At the risk of repeating to some extent the 
ideas quoted from previous papers, I shall record here 
a few statements from this one, as it gives the last 
views he held on his field of work. 

“Our conventional economics to-day analyzes no 
phase of industrialism or the wage-relationship, or 
citizenship in pecuniary society, in a manner to offer 
a key to such distressing and complex problems as 
this. Human nature riots to-day through our economic 
structure,with ridicule and destruction; and we econo¬ 
mists look on helpless and aghast. The menace of the 
war does not seem potent to quiet revolt or still class 
cries. The anxiety and apprehension of the economist 
should not be produced by this cracking of his eco¬ 
nomic system, but by the poverty of the criticism of 
industrialism which his science offers. Why are 
economists mute in the presence of a most obvious 
crisis in our industrial society? Why have our criti¬ 
cisms of industrialism no sturdy warnings about this 
unhappy evolution? Why does an agitated officialdom 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


m 

search to-day in vain among our writings, for scien¬ 
tific advice touching labor-inefficiency or industrial 
disloyalty, for prophecies and plans about the rise in 
our industrialism of economic classes unharmonious 
and hostile? 

“The fair answer seems this: We economists specu¬ 
late little on human motives.We are not curious about 
the great basis of fact which dynamic and behavioris¬ 
tic psychology has gathered to illustrate the instinct 
stimulus to human activity. Most of us are not inter¬ 
ested to think of what a psychologically full or satis¬ 
fying life is. We are not curious to know that a great 
school of behavior analysis called the Freudian has 
been built around the analysis of the energy outbursts 
brought by society’s balking of the native human 
instincts. Our economic literature shows that we are 
but rarely curious to know whether industrialism is 
suited to man’s inherited nature, or what man in 
turn will do to our rules of economic conduct in case 
these rules are repressive. The motives to economic 
activity which have done the major service in ortho¬ 
dox economic texts and teachings have been either 
the vague middle-class virtues of thrift, justice, and 
solvency, or the equally vague moral sentiments of 
‘striving for the welfare of others,’ ‘desire for the 
larger self,’ ‘desire to equip one’s self well,’ or, lastly, 
the labor-saving deduction that man is stimulated in 
all things economic by his desire to satisfy his wants 
with the smallest possible effort. All this gentle parody 
in motive theorizing continued contemporaneously 
with the output of the rich literature of social and 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


m 

behavioristic psychology which was almost entirely 
addressed to this very problem of human motives in 
modern economic society. Noteworthy exceptions are 
the remarkable series of books by Veblen, the articles 
and criticisms of Mitchell and Patten, and the most 
significant small book by Taussig, entitled 1 Inventors 
and Money-makers.’ It is this complementary field 
of psychology to which the economists must turn, as 
these writers have turned, for a vitalization of their 
basic hypotheses. There awaits them a bewildering 
array of studies of the motives, emotions, and folk¬ 
ways of our pecuniary civilization. Generalizations 
and experiment statistics abound, ready-made for any 
structure of economic criticism. The human motives 
are isolated, described, compared. Business confidence, 
the release of work-energy, advertising appeal, market 
vagaries, the basis of value computations, decay of 
workmanship, the labor unrest, decline in the thrift 
habit, are the subjects treated. 

“All human activity is untiringly actuated by the 
demand for realization of the instinct wants. If an 
artificially limited field of human endeavor be called 
economic life, all its so-called motives hark directly 
back to the human instincts for their origin. There are , 
in truth , no economic motives as such. The motives of 
economic life are the same as those of the life of art, 
of vanity and ostentation, of war and crime, of sex. 
Economic life is merely the life in which instinct 
gratification is alleged to take on a rational pecuniary 
habit form. Man is not less a father, with a father’s 
parental instinct, just because he passes down the 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


l 7S 

street from his home to his office. His business raid 
into his rival's market has the same naive charm 
that tickled the heart of his remote ancestor when in 
the night he rushed the herds of a near-by clan. A 
manufacturer tries to tell a conventional world that 
he resists the closed shop because it is un-American, 
it loses him money, or it is inefficient. A few years 
ago he was more honest, when he said he would run 
his business as he wished and would allow no man 
to tell him what to do. His instinct of leadership, re¬ 
inforced powerfully by his innate instinctive revul¬ 
sion to the confinement of the closed shop, gave the 
true stimulus. His opposition is psychological, not 
ethical.” 

He then goes on to catalogue and explain the fol¬ 
lowing instincts which he considered of basic impor¬ 
tance in any study of economics: (i) gregariousness; 

(2) parental bent, motherly behavior, kindliness; 

(3) curiosity, manipulation, workmanship; (4) acqui¬ 
sition, collecting, ownership; (5) fear and flight; 
(6) mental activity, thought; (7) the housing or set¬ 
tling instinct; (8) migration, homing; (9) hunting 
(“ Historic revivals of hunting urge make an interest¬ 
ing recital of religious inquisitions, witch-burnings, 
college hazings, persecution of suffragettes, of the 
I.W.W., of the Japanese, or of pacifists. All this goes 
on often under naive rationalization about justice and 
patriotism, but it is pure and innate lust to run some¬ 
thing down and hurt it”); (10) anger, pugnacity; 
(11) revolt at confinement, at being limited in liberty 
of action and choice; (12) revulsion; (13) leadership 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


176 

and mastery; (14) subordination, submission; (15) dis¬ 
play, vanity, ostentation; (16) sex. 

After quoting from Professor Cannon, and discuss¬ 
ing the contributions that his studies have made to 
the subject of man's reaction to his immediate envi¬ 
ronment, he continues: — 

“The conclusion seems both scientific and logical, 
that behavior in anger, fear, pain, and hunger is a 
basically different behavior from behavior under re¬ 
pose and economic security. The emotions generated 
under the conditions of existence-peril seem to make 
the emotions and motives generative in quiet and 
peace pale and unequal. It seems impossible to avoid 
the conclusion that the most vital part of man’s 
inheritance is one which destines him to continue for 
some myriads of years ever a fighting animal when 
certain conditions exist in his environment. Though, 
through education, man be habituated in social and 
intelligent behavior or, through license, in sexual de¬ 
bauchery, still, at those times when his life or liberty 
is threatened, his instinct-emotional nature will in¬ 
hibit either social thought or sex ideas, and present 
him as merely an irrational fighting animal. . . . 

“The instincts and their emotions, coupled with 
the obedient body, lay down in scientific and exact 
description the motives which must and will deter¬ 
mine human conduct. If a physical environment set 
itself against the expression of these instinct motives, 
the human organism is fully and efficiently prepared 
for a tenacious and destructive revolt against this 
environment; and if the antagonism persist, the organ- 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


1 77 

ism is ready to destroy itself and disappear as a species 
if it fail of a psychical mutation which would make 
the perverted order endurable.” 

And in conclusion, he states: — 

“The dynamic psychology of to-day describes the 
present civilization as a repressive environment. For 
a great number of its inhabitants a sufficient self- 
expression is denied. There is, for those who care to 
see, a deep and growing unrest and pessimism. With 
the increase in knowledge is coming a new realization 
of the irrational direction of economic evolution. The 
economists, however, view economic inequality and 
life-degradation as objects in truth outside the science. 
Our value-concept is a price-mechanism hiding be¬ 
hind a phrase. If we are to play a part in the social 
readjustment immediately ahead, we must put human 
nature and human motives into our basic hypotheses. 
Our value-concept must be the yardstick to measure 
just how fully things and institutions contribute to a 
full psychological life. We must know more of the 
meaning of progress. The domination of society by one 
economic class has for its chief evil the thwarting of 
the instinct life of the subordinate class and the per¬ 
version of the upper class. The extent and character¬ 
istics of this evil are to be estimated only when we 
know the innate potentialities and inherited propensi¬ 
ties of man; and the ordering of this knowledge and 
its application to the changeable economic structure 
is the task before the trained economist to-day.” 

A little later I saw one of the big men who was at 
that Economic Association meeting, and he said: “I 


178 AN AMERICAN IDYLL 

don’t see why Parker is n’t spoiled. He was the most 
talked-about man at the Convention.” Six publishing 
houses wrote, after that paper, to see if he could en¬ 
large it into a book. Somehow it did seem as if now 
more than ever the world was ours. We looked ahead 
into the future, and wondered if it could seem as good 
to any one as it did to us. It was almost too good — 
we were dazed a bit by it. It is one of the things I just 
cannot let myself ever think of — that future and the 
plans we had. Anything I can ever do now would still 
leave life so utterly dull by comparison. 



CHAPTER XVII 


One of the days in Seattle that I think of most was 
about a month before the end. The father of a great 
friend of ours died, and Carl and I went to the funeral 
one Sunday afternoon. We got in late, so stood in a 
corner by the door, and held hands, and seemed to own 
each other especially hard that day. Afterwards we 
prowled around the streets, talking of funerals and 
old age. 

Most of the people there that afternoon were gray¬ 
haired — the family had lived in Seattle for years 
and years, and these were the friends of years and 
years back. Carl said: “That is something we can’t 
have when you and I die — the old, old friends who 
have stood by us year in and year out. It is one 
of the phases of life you sacrifice when you move 
around at the rate we do. But in the first place, neither 
of us wants a funeral, and in the second place, we feel 
that moving gives more than it takes away — so we 
are satisfied.” 

Then we talked about our own old age — planned 
it in detail. Carl declared: “ I want you to promise me 
faithfully you will make me stop teaching when I am 
sixty. I have seen too much of the tragedy of men 
hanging on and on and students and education being 
sacrificed because the teacher has lost his fire — has 
fallen behind in the parade. I feel now as if I’d never 
grow old — that does n’t mean that I won’t. So, no 





i8o 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


matter how strong I may be going at sixty, make me 
stop — promise.” 

Then we discussed our plans: by that time the 
children would be looking out for themselves, — very 
much so, — and we could plan as we pleased. It was 
to be England — some suburb outside of London, 
where we could get into big things, and yet where 
we could be peaceful and by ourselves, and read and 
write, and have the young economists who were 
traveling about, out to spend week-ends with us; and 
then we could keep our grandchildren while their par¬ 
ents were traveling in Europe! About a month from 
that day, he was dead. 

There is a path I must take daily to my work at 
college, which passes through the University Botan¬ 
ical Garden. Every day I must brace myself for it, 
for there, growing along the path, is a clump of old- 
fashioned morning glories. Always, from the time we 
first came back to teach in Berkeley and passed along 
that same path to the University, we planned to have 
morning glories like those — the odor came to meet 
you yards away — growing along the path to the 
little home we would at last settle down in when we 
were old. We used always to remark pictures in the 
newspapers, of So-and-so on their * 1 golden anniver¬ 
sary,” and would plan about our own “golden wed¬ 
ding-day” — old age together always seemed so good 
to think about. There was a time when we used to 
plan to live in a lighthouse, way out on some point, 
when we got old. It made a strong appeal, it really 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


181 


did. We planned many ways of growing old — not 
that we talked of it often, perhaps twice a year, but 
always, always it was, of course, together. Strange, 
that neither of us ever dreamed one would grow old 
without the other. 

And yet, too, there is the other side. I found a let¬ 
ter written during our first summer back in Berkeley, 
just after we had said good-bye at the station when 
Carl left for Chicago. Among other things he wrote: 
“ It just makes me feel bad to see other folks living 
put-in lives, when we two (four) have loved through 
Harvard and Europe and it has only commenced, and 
no one is loving so hard or living so happily. ... I am 
most willing to die now (if you die with me), for we 
have lived one complete life of joy already.” And 
then he added — if only the adding of it could have 
made it come true: “But we have fifty years yet of 
love.” 

Oh, it was so true that we packed into ten years 
the happiness that could normally be considered to 
last a lifetime — a long lifetime. Sometimes it seems 
almost as if we must have guessed it was to end so 
soon, and lived so as to crowd in all the joy we could 
while our time together was given us. I say so often 
that I stand right now the richest woman in the world 
— why talk of sympathy? I have our three precious, 
marvelously healthy children, I have perfect health 
myself, I have all and more than I can handle of big 
ambitious maturing plans, with a chance to see them 
carried out, I have enough to live on, and, greatest of 
all, fifteen years of perfect memories — And yet, to 


182 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


hear a snatch of a tune and know that the last time 
you heard it you were together — perhaps it was the 
very music they played as you left the theatre arm- 
in-arm that last night; to put on a dress you have not 
worn for some time and remember that, when you 
last had it on, it was the night you went, just the two 
of you, to Blanc’s for dinner; to meet unexpectedly 
some friend, and recall that the last time you saw 
him it was that night you two, strolling with hands 
clasped, met him on Second Avenue accidentally, 
and chatted on the corner; to come across a necktie 
in a trunk, to read a book he had marked, to see his 
handwriting — perhaps just the address on an old 
baggage-check — Oh, one can sound so much braver 
than one feels! And then, because you have tried so 
hard to live up to the pride and faith he had in you, 
to be told: “You know I am surprised that you 
have n’t taken Carl’s death harder. You seem to be 
just the same exactly.” 

What is seeming? Time and time again, these 
months, I have thought, what do any of us know 
about what another person feels? A smile — a laugh 
— I used to think of course they stood for happiness. 
There can be many smiles, much laughter, and it 
means — nothing. But surely anything is kinder for 
a friend to see than tears! 

When Carl returned from the East in January, he 
was more rushed than ever — his time more filled 
than ever with strike mediations, street-car arbitra¬ 
tions, cost of living surveys for the Government, con¬ 
ferences on lumber production. In all, he had mediated 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 183 

thirty-two strikes, sat on two arbitration boards, 
made three cost-of-living surveys for the Government. 
(Mediations did gall him — he grew intellectually 
impatient over this eternal patching up of what he 
was wont to call “a rotten system.” Of course he saw 
the war-emergency need of it just then, but what he 
wanted to work on was, why were mediations ever nec¬ 
essary? what social and economic order would best 
ensure absence of friction?) 

On the campus work piled up. He had promised to 
give a course on Employment Management, espe¬ 
cially to train men to go into the lumber industries 
with a new vision. (Each big company east of the 
mountains was to send a representative.) It was also 
open to seniors in college, and a splendid group it was, 
almost every one pledged to take up employment 
management as their vocation on graduation — no 
fear that they would take it up with a capitalist bias. 
Then — his friends and I had to laugh, it was so like 
him — the afternoon of the morning he arrived, he 
was in the thick of a scrap on the campus over a 
principle he held to tenaciously — the abolition of 
the one-year modern-language requirement for stu¬ 
dents in his college. To use his own expression, he 
“went to the bat on it,” and at a faculty meeting that 
afternoon it carried. He had been working his little 
campaign for a couple of months, but in his absence 
in the East the other side had been busy. He returned 
just in time for the fray. Every one knows what a 
farce one year of a modern language is at college; even 
several of the language teachers themselves were 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


184 

frank enough to admit it. But it was an academic 
tradition! I think the two words that upset Carl most 
were “efficiency” and “tradition” — both being used 
too often as an excuse for practices that did more 
harm than good. 

And then came one Tuesday, the fifth of March. 
He had his hands full all morning with the continued 
threatened upheavals of the longshoremen. About 
noon the telephone rang — threatened strike in all 
the flour-mills; Dr. Parker must come at once. (I am 
reminded of a description which was published of 
Carl as a mediator. “He thought of himself as a 
physician and of an industry on strike as the patient. 
And he did not merely ease the patient’s pain with 
opiates. He used the knife and tried for permanent 
cures.”) I finally reached him by telephone; his voice 
sounded tired, for he had had a very hard morning. 
By one o’clock he was working on the flour-mill situ¬ 
ation. He could not get home for dinner. About mid¬ 
night he appeared, having sat almost twelve hours 
steadily on the new flour-difficulty. He was “all in,” 
he said. 

The next morning, one of the rare instances in our 
years together, he claimed that he did not feel like 
getting up. But there were four important confer¬ 
ences that day to attend to, besides his work at col¬ 
lege. He dressed, ate breakfast, then said he felt fever¬ 
ish. His temperature was 102. I made him get back 
into bed — let all the conferences on earth explode. 
The next day his temperature was 105. “This has 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


185 

taught us our lesson — no more living at this pace. I 
don’t need two reminders that I ought to call a halt.” 
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday he lay there, too 
weary to talk, not able to sleep at all nights; the doc¬ 
tor coming regularly, but unable to tell just what 
the trouble was, other than a “breakdown.” 

Saturday afternoon he felt a little better; we 
planned then what we would do when he got well. 
The doctor had said that he should allow himself at 
least a month before going back to college. One month 
given to us! “Just think of the writing I can get done, 
being around home with my family!” There was an 
article for Taussig half done to appear in the “Quar¬ 
terly Journal of Economics,” a more technical analy¬ 
sis of the I.W.W. than had appeared in the “Atlantic 
Monthly”; he had just begun a review for the 
“American Journal of Economics” of Hoxie’s “Trade- 
Unionism.” Then he was full of ideas for a second 
article he had promised the “Atlantic” — “Is the 
United States a Nation?”—“And think of being 
able to see all I want of the June-Bug!” 

Since he had not slept for three nights, the doctor 
left powders which I was to give him for Saturday 
night. Still he could not sleep. He thought that, if I 
read aloud to him in a monotonous tone of voice, he 
could perhaps drop off. I got a high-school copy of 
“From Milton to Tennyson,” and read every sing- 
songy poem I could find — “The Ancient Mariner” 
twice, hardly pronouncing the words as I droned 
along. Then he began to get delirious. 

It is a very terrifying experience — to see for 


i86 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


the first time a person in a delirium, and that person 
the one you love most on earth. All night long I sat 
there trying to quiet him — it was always some medi¬ 
ation, some committee of employers he was attend¬ 
ing. He would say: “ I am so tired — can’t you people 
come to some agreement, so that I can go home 
and sleep?” 

At first I would say: '‘Dearest, you must be quiet 
and try to go to sleep.” — “But I can’t leave the 
meeting!” He would look at me in such distress. 
So I learned my part, and at each new discussion 
he would get into, I would suggest: “Here’s Will 
Ogburn just come — he’ll take charge of the meeting 
for you. You come home with me and go to sleep.” 
So he would introduce Will to the gathering, and add: 
“Gentlemen, my wife wants me to go home with her 
and go to sleep — good-bye.” For a few moments he 
would be quiet. Then, “O my Lord, something to 
investigate! What is it this time?” I would cut in 
hastily: “The Government feels next week will be 
plenty of time for this investigation.” He would look 
at me seriously. “ Did you ever know the Government 
to give you a week’s time to begin?” Then, “Tele¬ 
grams— more telegrams! Nobody keeps their word, 
nobody.” 

About six o’clock in the morning I could wait no 
longer and called the doctor. He pronounced it pneu¬ 
monia — an absolutely different case from any he 
had ever seen: no sign of it the day before, though it 
was what he had been watching for all along. Every 
hospital in town was full. A splendid trained nurse 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 187 

came at once to the house — “the best nurse in the 
whole city,” the doctor announced with relief. 

Wednesday afternoon the crisis seemed to have 
passed. That whole evening he was himself, and I — 
I was almost delirious from sheer joy. To hear his 
dear voice again just talking naturally! He noticed 
the nurse for the first time. He was jovial — happy. 
“I am going to get some fun out of this now!” he 
smiled. “And oh, won’t we have a time, my girl, 
while I am convalescing!” And we planned the rosiest 
weeks any one ever planned. Thursday the nurse 
shaved him — he not only joked and talked like his 
dear old self — he looked it as well. (All along he had 
been cheerful — always told the doctor he was “feel¬ 
ing fine”; never complained of anything. It amused 
the doctor so one morning, when he was leaning over 
listening to Carl’s heart and lungs, as he lay in more 
or less of a doze and partial delirium. A twinkle sud¬ 
denly came into Carl’s eye. “You sprung a new neck¬ 
tie on me this morning, did n’t you?” Sure enough, 
it was new.) 

Thursday morning the nurse was preparing things 
for his bath in another room and I was with Carl. 
The sun was streaming in through the windows and 
my heart was too contented for words. He said: “Do 
you know what I’ve been thinking of so much this 
morning? I’ve been thinking of what it must be to go 
through a terrible illness and not have some one you 
loved desperately around. I say to myself all the 
while: ‘Just think, my girl was here all the time — 
my girl will be here all the time!’ I’ve lain here this 




AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


188 

morning and wondered more than ever what good 
angel was hovering over me the day I met you.” 

I put this in because it is practically the last thing 
he said before delirium came on again, and I love to 
think of it. He said really more than that. 

In the morning he would start calling for me early 
— the nurse would try to soothe him for a while, then 
would call me. I wanted to be in his room at night, 
but they would not let me — there was an unborn 
life to be thought of those days, too. As soon as I 
reached his bed, he would clasp my hand and hold it 
oh, so tight. “I’ve been groping for you all night — 
all night! Why don't they let me find you?” Then, in 
a moment, he would not know I was there. Daytimes 
I had not left him five minutes, except for my meals. 
Several nights they had finally let me be by him, any¬ 
way. Saturday morning for the first time since the 
crisis the doctor was encouraged. “Things are really 
looking up,” and “You go out for a few moments in 
the sun!” 

I walked a few blocks to the Mudgetts’ in our de¬ 
partment, to tell them the good news, and then back; 
but my heart sank to its depths again as soon as I 
entered Carl’s room. The delirium always affected me 
that way: to see the vacant stare in his eyes — no 
look of recognition when I entered. 

The nurse went out that afternoon. “He’s doing 
nicely,” was the last thing she said. She had not been 
gone half an hour — it was just two-fifteen — and I 
was lying on her bed watching Carl, when he called, 
“Buddie, I’m going — come hold my hand.” O my 


AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


189 

God — I dashed for him, I clung to him, I told him 
he could not, must not go — we needed him too ter¬ 
ribly, we loved him too much to spare him. I felt so 
sure of it, that I said: “Why, my love is enough to 
you here! ” 

He would not let me leave him to call the doctor. 
I just knelt there holding both his hands with all my 
might, talking, talking, telling him we were not going 
to let him go. And then, at last, the color came back 
into his face, he nodded his head a bit, and said, “ I ’ll 
stay,” very quietly. Then I was able to rush for the 
stairs and tell Mrs. Willard to telephone for the doc¬ 
tor. Three doctors we had that afternoon. They re¬ 
ported the case as “dangerous, but not absolutely 
hopeless.” His heart, which had been so wonderful all 
along, had given out. That very morning the doctor 
had said: “ I wish my pulse was as strong as that! ” and 
there he lay — no pulse at all. They did everything: 
our own doctor stayed till about ten, then left, with 
Carl resting fairly easily. He lived only a block away. 

About one-thirty the nurse had me call the doctor 
again. I could see things were going wrong. Once 
Carl started to talk rather loud. I tried to quiet him 
and he said: “Twice I’ve pulled and fought and strug¬ 
gled to live just for you [one of the times had been 
during the crisis]. Let me just talk if I want to. I 
can’t make the fight a third time — I’m so tired.” 

Before the doctor could get there, he was dead. 

With our beliefs what they were, there was only one 
thing to be done. We had never discussed it in detail, 



AN AMERICAN IDYLL 


190 

but I felt absolutely sure I was doing as he would 
have me do. His body was cremated, without any 
service whatsoever — nobody present but one of his 
brothers and a great friend. The next day the two 
men scattered his ashes out on the waters of Puget 
Sound. I feel it was as he would have had it. 

“Out of your welded lives — welded in spirit and 
in the comradeship that you had in his splendid work 
— you know everything that I could say. 

“I grieve for you deeply — and I rejoice for any 
woman who, for even a few short years, is given the 
great gift in such a form.” 


THE END 



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